As SayUncle puts it, make sure to buckle up and watch for state troopers while you’re illegally buying fireworks.
In our case, the fireworks are both illegal and not really all that good an idea, to be perfectly honest. I did do a lot of driving yesterday, and saw a fair number of state troopers, but no DWI checkpoints; I did 80 MPH much of the way without incident. Unfortunately, while I was driving this route, I was doing so fairly early in the morning, before Lawrence wrote this post, so I missed out on the best potato chips ever. (Surely someone in Austin sells them.)
So what else can you do to celebrate the 4th? Well, you can hit the gun store, provided you have one near you that’s open on 4th of July Monday. (All the good independent gun stores in Austin are closed Sunday and Monday, but Cabela’s in Buda is open today. Edited to add: And the Cabela’s in Buda was not the Mongolian fire drill I was expecting.)
Or you could go to the range. Provided you can get a slot on the firing line, given that everyone else and his brother has probably had the same idea.
If you have a veterans cemetery near you, you could also go pay your respects.
I don’t actually know Richard Johnson or his family, but I stumbled (almost literally) on that marker, and there’s something striking about it. He would have been roughly 28 years old when the United States entered the war. What was he doing before then? What was life like as a 2nd Lieutenant during World War I? Where did he serve? Did he see action? He lived for 58 more years after the end of the war: what did he do with the rest of his life?
I want to add a nice word here for the VA’s Nationwide Gravesite Locator, which was indispensable. (The gravesite locator at the Houston cemetery was broken when we were there.) It would be nice to have a version of this tool that’s optimized for smart phones, but the existing version did work on my Evo.
