The weather held out for us this weekend, so on Sunday we took a trip over to the Wings over Houston airshow. We decided not to actually go on Ellington field grounds because we weren't sure about the noise level. I remembered from a few years ago that the noise level was tremendous.

Last time we went to the airshow was 3 years ago. That airshow, although it was really cool, was tempered by the unfortunate death of one of the participants. Thank God this year there were no such occurrences.

Anyways, we decided not to go to the airshow proper. Instead, we opted for Sylvan Rodriguez park off of Clear Lake City Blvd. Apparently several other folks thought the same thing, because when we got there cars were parked all the way to the gate entrance. We jumped into the first parking spot we could find, and unloaded the baby, dog, a few chairs, and a blanket and walked our way towards the "perfect" viewing location. If you're not familiar w/ S.R. park, it's pretty large (not large like Zilker park in Austin or Central park in NY, but pretty large just the same). There were lots of people there, but still plenty of room to spread out your stuff and let the dog run around a bit. I think Gracie (that's our 4-yr old Golden Retriever) became the side show for about 10 of the kids there with their parents to see the airshow. She got lots of attention.

S.R. park is a great location, because the planes fly right over the park on their approach. There were some pretty close encounters with some of those planes. Specifically, the F-15 and the thunderbirds. The F-15 was freakin' LOUD! It did quite a few maneuvers, practically all with the afterburners on. One move brought the plane in a pretty tight turn, and almost directly over our heads. We had to cover poor Stephen's ears for most of that! He was a little scared, but didn't cry except for that one maneuver.

The Thunderbirds were pretty neat. At one point, 4 of them were flying in formation, and flew within 100 yards of us (at least we guess-timated they were about a football field away, but it seemed even closer). Had they been turning towards us instead of away from us, we would have been able to see the pilots inside.

Stephen did a great job handling the noise. Much better than the Independence Day incident, where he was crying all the time when the fire trucks were going by! And he got to play with a bunch of kids. A fun time was had by all.