Blue Angels

My 7:30 alarm never woke me Saturday morning because I had already been awake for two hours. At 5:30 Oxbear and Puck took off down Highway 70 for a full day of adventures, starting with a 9:00 Legofest appointment in Kansas City.

This left Yali and me to our own day of something any good red-blooded St. Louisan appreciates – a quality air show featuring only some of the very best.

10:15.

I pulled into the parking lot across from the old House of Denmark with Mom, Carrie-Bri, and Yali. With Elmer and Jaya leaving for Colorado with Jaya’s family, Rose working Operation Clean Stream, and Francis actually working – “working” – the air show, giving him a free seat on the static line, we deposited Irish at Dillard’s for another shift while we pulled in an hour early for a good view. Yes, we were on the outskirts of the airport. Tickets sold out last month. How can tickets actually sell out at an air show anyway? We thought that one through while we waited for the aircraft to make their first appearance.

Temps weren’t even in the 50s yet when 11:15 hit under a low cloud ceiling. We wrapped up to sit on a nearby patch of grass. Little did we know it would be another four hours before our favorites coasted down the runway for take-off. First we had to get past the Canadian Air Force and the Stealth Bomber, which are interesting, of course, but they weren’t the reason we were there.

Francis texted us updates from the front lines. But after he passed on some faulty information about an F-18 intending to break the sound barrier for the crowds below – and it clearly did not – that put a bit of a damper on expectations.

So as the hours dragged on, even with the sun emerging to bake our faces a crispy red – despite that cool wind – plus the excessive wait, we never made plans to leave early, because: it’s the Blue Angels.

There are few sounds more thrilling than a fighter jet tearing through the sky right over your head. Nothing else quite like it. And the Blue Angels know how to play that to the crowds just right.

Despite this fantastic display of coordination and thundering after-burners, however, Yali remained clearly more interested in studying his little rock collection from a nearby gravel pile. It takes a little while to acquire that St. Louis blood, I suppose.