Memorial Day

Memorial Day, Fountain Hills

We had a rare 3-day weekend, Michael doesn't get many holidays off. It started with a lot of food on Saturday. Nancy and Ron offered to bring a "few snacks" up to munch on for a picnic and then packed the whole rear of their SUV with food and drink. Burp. The picnic will continue all week.

Sunday, we were invited to a birthday party for 3 young (but now slightly older) girls. Of course, that meant lots of food & drink. Once in the backyard, we ran into this behemoth. Holy cow.

Seriously, look at it. It's taller than the house! It didn't take long for Michael to test it out. 

I don't know what this is...

Men.

The view from the top. This was not a slide for the faint hearted.



And then it was Memorial Day.


Neither of us remembers actually doing anything to commemorate this holiday in the past, so we decided to attend the memorial organized by the local VFW. There are a lot of veterans in Fountain Hills and several organizations to represent them from the VFW to the Rotary to the Kiwanis, to the American Legion. The Boy and Girl Scouts also participated by planting flags for soldiers who had lost their lives since 9/11 (they plan to do this for a different conflict each year; they might want to skip doing that for the Civil War and its over 600,000 casualties). They created a list of the fallen by the state they were born in and then lined up the American flags behind the state flags. It was a lot of work (there were over 2,300 of them) but very effective.



There were also displays to memorialize 9/11 and Pearl Harbor.



The speeches were really interesting. We heard a great account about Mitchell Paige who fought against the Japanese during WWII and was the inspiration for one of the GI Joe action figures. We also learned about the USS Arizona and burials at sea. Then we heard a story told from a father to his son (both soldiers) about where Taps originated (the same story is listed as a "legend" on Wikipedia). All I know is that Taps gives me goosebumps every time I hear it. It was also nice to be able to applaud a live veteran, recently returned from Afghanistan. He was in charge of Mortuary Affairs so that really brought home the meaning of the day. Here's to a peaceful future and better care for the veterans still alive.

To finish off the day and weekend, we took another hike up Tom's Thumb. And then we ate again...