Day 26: Fire Worked-Up

On our drive through Tennessee up to Ohio on Thursday, I noticed lots and lots of fireworks stores and thought it would be a great, fun, new thing to do to buy fireworks legally and shoot them off, since all the good ones are prohibited in Georgia. It was too late at night to buy them then, so I planned it for today on our trip back to Atlanta.

En route home, we stopped at Fireworks Supermarket, and went in to search for the firecracker we would eventually shoot off. The guys there were super eager to help and were thrilled to see us since they receive so few customers during the off-season.

We asked one over-eager young man something to the effect of "What's Good?" and he directed me to something that he described as "colorful," and "loud," saying that it was "better" than the one I was holding in my hand. I'm prone to accept help of others, so I took his advice.

In this particular section I was perusing, I saw this great video that was a beautiful fountain-like spray of sparkles and figured that would be a good beginner-level firework to set off. Mark and I purchased that and a couple others and went on my merry way.

We pulled over when it got dark and found a place to launch our rocket. We set up camp and made a plan, of the 'run this far,' 'I'll park here,' 'set it there' variety and lit the fuse.

I lit the fuse and ran as fast as I could away to watch the sparkle trickle down towards the firework. It stopped, and for a second, there was no response. Then, out of no where, I saw a little pellet shoot up into the air. What went off was ABSOLUTELY NOT a fountainy, sparkly, three-foot high blitz, but a freaking 5-story high, loud-cracking nuclear grade explosive that shot seven times.

Thank you over-eager young gentleman for directing me to the Tomahawk missile section. 'Preciate it.

I ran. I almost puked. I'm still freaked out. If you want to see what it looked like, go here: http://bit.ly/alaBHY

From now on, I'm leaving the fireworks to the pros.