With the 4th falling on a Wednesday this year I would have had to take two days of vacation to properly take advantage of it with a trip to Idaho and blow stuff up. My vacation is a little bit in short supply for all the other things I want to do this year so I let Barron serve as my proxy:
Instead I went sailing for the first time in 40 years. And last time it was on little boat that was maybe 15 feet long.
This was a 36 foot yacht:
And how many yachts do you know that have a switch panel like this:
Close up of the more “interesting” switch:
Yes! This is my type of boat.
We didn’t actually use the front (or rear) torpedoes. Our entire cruise was within a few miles of U.S. naval and/or Coast Guard ships at all times and had there been torpedo activity in the water near them I suspect they would have noticed and their response would have been less than friendly.
But we did watch the fireworks display from the yacht that evening. It was very nice:
Dangit, you’ve made me miss my sailboat.
I used to love night sailing and spending the 4th on the lake, watching the fireworks, is great fun!
I used to have a couple of switches like that in an Opel GT. One was labeled “Passenger Ejection Seat”, the other was labeled “Rocket Launcher”.