Independence Day (what did you blow up?)

[LocoColt04]

So, for those who observe holidays, how did you spend your 4th of July and the surrounding weekend times?!

Aenne flew down from Portland and we drove to Austin for five days of forgetting the outside world exists. We utilized AirBnB to secure a small apartment for four nights, did a small amount of touristy things, and mostly just went to some of my favorite places in the capital that I wanted to share with her. Adorable vintage coffee shops, swimming, Zilker botanical gardens, Salt Lick, Taquiéra Taco More, and fireworks on the roof of a ten-story parking structure.

There may have also been large amounts of wine and whiskey along the way. It got a little fuzzy in the middle.

[Robbo]

I'm British so I didn't do anything special, nursed off a hangover and watched Always sunny in Philadelphia which I have fallen in love with at this point.

Glad to hear you had a Happy Traitor day though :-)

[OceanEyes28]

o u wanna kno?

OKAY so. Drove out of town 2.5 hours to get to a friend's cabin in the middle of nowhere. Ominous clouds, bottom drops out, can't see, we make it to what we think is the "driveway" (dirt road through pasture and forests and shit), but there's a gate and we have no cell service to make sure so we just GUESS and roll down someone's dirt road looking for their home like "lol hope this is the right place because there are SO MANY confederate flags out here." Like white privilege is being able to drive through a place like that and find it weird and embarrassing rather than "o **** this was a mistake."

We lucked out. Right place. Cabin is like a mile onto his property. So. We shot guns at beer cans and fruits with explosives. Got on the back of a 4 wheeler and this crazy bitch drove us through some damn tree branches.

Next day, we wake up early, grab Subway sandwiches, go get canoes/kayaks for a float trip.

River looks like this:


There were like six rafts tied together with a platform on top of them and a gotdamn sound system blasting music as they floated down the rapids.

The river was high, but I was in a sit-on-top kayak, so I could have gone down rapids sideways and been fine. Canoes had a harder time. The canoe I had my cooler in tipped over and they lost half of my amazing sandwich.

That actually hurt my feelings a lot, because see, I had accepted the offer to take a drag off my friend's joint, thinking... floating a river! Nature! Hell yea!

WELL I OVERDID IT. ****.

So now I DON'T have a sandwich (it had banana peppers on it) and I'm floating down this busy river like "THIS IS FINE. IT'S FINE. JUST MOVE YOUR PADDLE. BE COOL" for like 45 minutes.

And I guess I looked pretty ridiculous because this dude paddled up to me in his kayak and was like "YOU'RE ON CAMERA, WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO?"
".....wha?"
"YOU'RE ON CAMERA. WHAT. ARE YOU. GONNA DO?"
"...paddle away from yoouu."
"ARE YOU GONNA SHOW YOUR TITS?!"
"nnooooo"

Anyway, then it starts raining real hard. And then it stops.

The longer we're on the river, the more aggressive these drunk guys are getting.

"i got beeaaads."
"So? I do too."
"whatever bitch" "yea she's not worth it anyway"

YOU'RE LIKE THIRTEEN GET THE **** OUTTA HERE

Anywho, we made it to the take-out, dropped off our boats with the rental guys, find out there's a police check point on the only way out. Well I've had three beers over the course of six hours (last one being two hours ago), so I'm feeling okay about being the driver. Except I'm still feeling that joint from three hours ago and I'm like "they're gonna know." So my friends buy me snacks and I eat a protein bar and a whole family sized bag of sour cream and onion chips and then I'm feeling pretty confident.

Get to the check point, cop walks up.
"License please."
I get it, and hand it to him.
"Are you really gonna make me introduce myself?"
I look up AND IT'S MY GODDAMN COP COUSIN. WHAT? IS THIS THE MOST REDNECK SHIT YOU EVER READ IN YOUR LIFE?! YEAH. IT PROBABLY IS.
He says have a nice day and off we go.

Happy Independence Day.

[Clint]

I got up at about 5 in the morning to watch WWE's live special from Japan, The Beast In The East. It was pretty good. It was nice to see Finn Balor (Prince Devitt) finally take the NXT title off of Kevin Owens. Balor is one of the best wrestlers in the world. I'm always rooting for him. It was also good to see Brock Lesnar back in action, even though he killed everybody. Though I think WWE missed an opportunity for some great cross-promotional matches with New Japan Pro Wrestling. I would have loved to see Kazuchika Okada and Shinsuke Nakamura on WWE programming, even just once.

The rest of that day was uneventful. Fireworks are illegal in my state, so being a law-abiding citizen, I couldn't blow anything up.

[Polk]

I got up at about 5 in the morning to watch WWE's live special from Japan, The Beast In The East. It was pretty good. It was nice to see Finn Balor (Prince Devitt) finally take the NXT title off of Kevin Owens. Balor is one of the best wrestlers in the world. I'm always rooting for him. It was also good to see Brock Lesnar back in action, even though he killed everybody. Though I think WWE missed an opportunity for some great cross-promotional matches with New Japan Pro Wrestling. I would have loved to see Kazuchika Okada and Shinsuke Nakamura on WWE programming, even just once.

The rest of that day was uneventful. Fireworks are illegal in my state, so being a law-abiding citizen, I couldn't blow anything up.

Finn Balor's body paint is stupid. It's like we get it man, you like Venom. We all like Venom. Back off, Finn Balor.

[Pete]

I unfortunately did not get to celebrate the fourth with a massive barbecue as I typically do. My girlfriend went out of town to visit her brother and brand spanking new niece, who I will admit is adorable. My friends all had other plans with their wives or other family and nobody could give me a definite answer. I wasn't going to just sit around with 40 pounds of meat in my hands, so I wound up watching the Rocky marathon and drinking a ton of American beer. Then I played some dragon age dlc, met up with an old friend and had some more beer.

Sunday was a recovery day.

[Unknown Entity]

I worked at Minecon. =D

Then came home, had a glass of the last of my whiskey and watched a few fireworks. It was more the odd flash in the sky, but now and then I firework would shoot further up.

Ocean, that looks and sounds like a blast! I'd love to do something like that. My brother's friend is a kayak instructor, and may be teaching me this summer. Not looking forward to capsize training, but it musts needs be done.

[OceanEyes28]

Entity: It WAS fun. And ridiculous. Sit on tops are the most fun for easy water, in my opinion. But the ones with the skirts and all, those can be neat. You are right to not be looking forward to learning how to roll, though. Upside down in the water, connected to a boat, and you have to DO THINGS to get upright again. I found it stressful.



Y'all hear about that guy what shot a firework off his head and kill't his'self?

[Rowan]

We dont celebrate independance day in Australia. What does it mean?

Y'all hear about that guy what shot a firework off his head and kill't his'self?

At least he went out with a bang.

[Pete]

We dont celebrate independance day in Australia. What does it mean?

We celebrate breaking free from British rule and forming the beginnings of a sovereign United States. The Declaration of Independence was adopted on July 4, so we consider it America's birthday.

Also, we drink too much, grill up some food and blow shit up. Murica

[Rowan]

We celebrate breaking free from British rule and forming the beginnings of a sovereign United States. The Declaration of Independence was adopted on July 4, so we consider it America's birthday.

Also, we drink too much, grill up some food and blow shit up. Murica

Oh I see. Australia doesn't have anything like that. We are the Queen's bitch.

[Pete]

Well, my friend, you should break free and drop that Union Jack from your flag.

You guys don't have any official date to celebrate your becoming a country or anything?

[noxious.sunshine]

My bf and I were originally planning on getting a hotel room somewhere in Manhattan (probably the Hilton Garden Inn) and our friends wanted to chip in and go with us, but we never had money to make it happen. Plus my bf and I weren't really feeling fighting all the foot traffic and stuff again.

So we stayed home, hung out at the beach for awhile and snuck beer down there, swam and boogie boarded and all that jazz.
And then we grilled out. One of our friends came over and grilled out with us and we drank beer and watched fireworks from outside. His girlfriend (our other friend) stayed back at their place.

It was fun, but the fireworks kind of triggered my bf's PTSD for a bit.

[cetra_aeris]

Ahhhhh, the 4th of July... Normally around this time I'm at the beach with my dad and watching fireworks shoot over the top of the Battleships and chilling with good food near the coastline. Unfortunately, as I am a mere few weeks from delivering a tiny human into the world, traveling more than 10 hours away was not recommended.

This year we stayed home and had some fun in the backyard. My daughter got to go swim in her inflatable pool, I made a " 'Murica themed" cake and we had steaks and hamburgers. Alcohol was unfortunately denied for me, cause you know lil human inside and all, but the BF took our daughter out to the fireworks stand last minute after dinner and let her pick a few that they shot off in the front of the house. Him and my little brother were shooting off all sorts of the tiny fireworks on the road in front of the house. Cars almost drove into them as they were going a couple times, one guy on a bike kept trying to come past right as they were going off (he may have really wanted to get burned I dunno) and we ended with little sparklers which my daughter got excited about. Someone down the road was shooting some of the larger fireworks off into the sky, which were pretty but scared the hell out of one of our dogs. lol

And because I was slightly proud of it you can see my tiny celebratory cake, which was apparently too sweet and needed to be less sugary according to the 4 year old and her father.
cake.jpg

[Pete]

Oh **** those hippies. You should be able to celebrate your country or heritage without shame. Liberals will always apologize for any culture that doesn't include apologizing for existing

[Rowan]

Oh **** those hippies. You should be able to celebrate your country or heritage without shame. Liberals will always apologize for any culture that doesn't include apologizing for existing

lmao, I read that in Hank Hill's voice.

[OceanEyes28]

Goddamnit Pete don't you politicize the Independence Day thread. Don't you do it.

[Alpha]

Goddamnit Pete don't you politicize the Independence Day thread. Don't you do it.

*twitch* Although my criticism of Australia Day is probably off topic in a thread about American Independence Day, from what I understand it's pretty much the same criticism made by Native Americans about these colonial celebrations essentially being "invasion day" or whatever. (I think this more applies to Columbus Day or Thanksgiving IDK much about these holidays except fireworks and red cups.) Australia spent tens of thousands of years not being known as Australia to the people who lived there. FWIW NZ's version is known as Waitangi Day where we commemorate the 1840 signing of an accord between the indigenous people and the colonisers that officially recognised individuals of both groups to be equal subjects of Her Majesty. Except non-Queen women, because they have periods or something. OFF TOPIC LIBERAL CRITICAL HIISTORY WOAOOOAH (sorry)

[Pete]

I make no promises Ally. I'll just post this picture of some of the things that are great about America.

Putting it up directly from phone, no idea if it'll work

IMG_20150716_195037852_HDR.jpg