Grissom Air Show

For those of you who aren't from around here, you might not know that there's an air reserve base just north of Kokomo. It's one of those places we've had in our backyard our whole lives, and neither of us had ever been there. (Everyone has those places, right?)

Several months ago, we read about plans for an upcoming air show at the base, and neither one of us had ever been to one of those either! It was a two day event, but we planned to go on Saturday. It turned out to be a gorgeous day. (A little more gorgeous than the forecast thought, so we didn't exactly dress appropriately. I hope all the sweat comes out!)

We went in the morning and spent a little bit of time looking at the planes. They had them open for people to tour. We would have loved to go through more of them, but we ran out of time before the show started, and then the show went so much longer than we thought it would, and we just wanted to come home when it was done. But here are a few pictures from the planes!

We had a great seat for the air show - behind the VIP area. We were close enough that we were able to see some of the low-to-the-ground stunts pretty well!

We had chairs, and we took plenty of sunscreen, but it was so sunny and so hot! The articles we read about the show said people were allowed to bring empty water bottles and fill them at water stations throughout the show, but we never saw any of them. We bought water, but it was pretty expensive, so we tried not to go crazy. I'm pretty sure we both had some dehydration going on when we came home.

My picture taking turned out better than I thought! I hadn't taken all my lenses, because I wasn't sure they'd let me take them all through security, and it wasn't exactly the kind of setup where you could just run back to the car very easily. And looking into the sun meant I often couldn't see what I was trying to photograph. So I was pretty excited to have a good selection of pictures! Here are some of the many I took.

The American flag arrived via parachute during National Anthem. (The guy that sang the anthem did a fantastic job, by the way.)

I am not a plane expert. I'm barely a novice! So I don't know the names of most of the planes, but hopefully you can enjoy their beauty anyway.

Yes! That last plane is upside down. There were lots of twirls and turns throughout the day!

We also saw some parachutes!

And more planes...

 They did a demonstration of how a rescue effort would have looked during Vietnam. They said the people in this demonstration were all Vietnam vets, and they received quite an ovation on their way back down the runway.

I feel like that's quite a string of pictures already, so I'll save the rest for tomorrow! (I took over 400 pictures, so I promise you're truly getting just a sample!)