Happy 5th of July!

In all seriousness, happy belated Independence Day to you all. I had a great day enjoying God's beautiful creation, America's pasttime, and of course fireworks! I almost celebrated a new holiday though...the 5th of July:

My day started off with church--which I really liked actually; we sang lots of patriotic hymns--and then the group (Immanuel Lutheran Church in Belvidere, IL (or TX if you're Pastor Heimer introducing them during church...even though I wrote "Illinois" and not even just "IL" on the Post-It note reminder I always give him)) wanted to do something touristy. We were having trouble finding things that were open, especially guided tours, because of the holiday, so eventually we settled on putzing around at Franklin Mountains State Park. It turned out to be tons of fun! We took a picnic lunch--I learned that coolers have rulers on top of them for measuring fish--and then a bunch of us hiked to this "cave." It was actually a 6 ft. or so deep hole in the rock with a bunch of graffiti in it, but worthwhile nonetheless for the adventure of getting there and the views. We could have taken the somewhat less treacherous $4 trail, but instead we decided to blaze our own. It looked fairly easy from the ground, but that was definitely deceiving! Needless to say we did take the actual trail on the way back down.

Why does there have to be a telephone pole there?

Our destination was that black dot in the center of the picture, and if you look REALLY closely you can see us en route, in the middle about 1/3 of the way up, right above the whitish path looking thing that cuts diagonally across.

Scenery on the way there...

Proof that I made it!

As did everyone else--thank you self-timer!

Then it was off to the Diablos game/fireworks spectacular, after stopping at 7-11 for some more cold beverages since everyone, especially the hikers, was out of H2O.The Diablos jumped out ahead early 9-2, and the lead grew as big as 16-5 at one point. Then their opponents, the Shreveport-Bossier Captains, came back and tied it! For awhile the Captain pitchers couldn't find the strike zone, but the Diablos wound up swallowing a dose of their own medicine until the score was tied at 18. After a couple more lead changes in the final innings, the Captains were ahead 21-20 going into the bottom of the 9th. We all really wanted to stay for the fireworks, but also just wanted the never-ending, albeit thrilling, game to end. Keep in mind that it takes a LONG time to score that many runs, so it was going on 11:00 pm at that point when the game had started at 6:30. In short, the fireworks came early as the Diablos tied the game and then won 24-21 on a walk-off 3-run HR (only the 2nd of the game), and then we got to see the real fireworks, which ended with about 45 minutes left of the 4th of July. If the game had gone into extra innings they very well could have taken place on the 5th of July though! Total game time was 4 hrs, 19 min, and there were 51 combined hits to go along with the 45 combined runs! I keep checking the Diablos website for a news article since that has to be some sort of record, but there is nothing up yet. We got back to the mission about 12:30 am, but I am happy to report that we still made great progress on our house today, especially when you compare it to last year, when we didn't pound a single nail on Monday since we had to pour our slab!