Gas prices don't seem so bad... compared to jet-fuel.

The kids and I convinced my parents that they really wanted to take us to the Miramar Air Show in San Diego this last weekend. It was a great chance to visit Aunt Joan, and Shaun got hired on to help with the video feed at the show so he got us free tickets.

The trip down on Saturday morning was great. Abbie seemed to be the most excited to see Aunt Joan and visit Shaun at the show and kept saying "I going on an airplane!" to pretty much anyone nearby. The boys played with their little Blue Angels model airplanes all week that Shaun had picked up at the last show he did with them. The funniest thing on the trip up - Kayla asked for a tissue since she was sick and Abbie promptly said "I need a tissue too!". I glanced over, saw that she was fine and said "no you don't, you're fine." Without even missing a beat, she quickly exhaled through her nose, looked at me with snot running down her face and said "NOW I do". I just died laughing. She is SO quick-thinking.

After lunch with Aunt Joan we headed over to use the Preferred Parking pass Shaun had wrangled for us, thinking we would pretty much sail right in. Yeah... about that... After taking about one and a half hours to go the 10 blocks from the off-ramp to the parking spot (super close thankfully as opposed to everyone else that ended up about 2 miles from the show and had to be shuttled in), we were just sitting down as the Blue Angels took off for the last part of the afternoon show. Perfect timing!

We had a great time and left early from the evening show. We were able to get out of there pretty fast, just as it started to rain. We missed the fireworks and the Wall of Fire but we also missed about 2 hours of traffic trying to get out of there later. Shaun later said that the count that day was 250,000 people in attendance. I believe it. I'm pretty sure every one of them was in front of us in line when we tried to use the porta-potties.

The highlights of the show were, of course, the Blue Angels (amazing how close they fly to each other!), the Harriet jet plane (it can come to a deafeningly loud complete stop in the air and just hover there by changing the direction of it's exhaust!), the truck with the jet engines on the back (it's like it has huge flame throwers on the back - that CAN'T be safe), and the Oracle one-of-a-kind acrobatic bi-plane (extra-special since his son went up in another plane and they did all sorts of neat loops and drops together). The boys are now planning on being fighter jet pilots when they grow up, of course.

Shaun said that most of the pilots in the air-show actually donate their time. I read a newspaper article the next day that had interviewed one of the pilots. He said that even after getting sponsors to pay for the jet fuel, travel expenses and everything else he still ends up spending about $250,000./year out of pocket. That's quite the price tag for even that big of a thrill.