Today is my birthday! I’m now 37 years old, and I have a few friends coming over today to play board games and hang out. Yesterday my husband and I went to the airshow at Andrews Air Force Base, and had an absolute blast. It’s the first time in twelve years that the Thunderbirds and the Blue Angels have been at the same show, so it was really exciting. I used to go (or rather, get dragged to) airshows all the time when I was younger, but haven’t been to one in almost twenty years. I loved the Blue Angels when I was little, so it was really neat getting to see them again. My husband, despite being in the Marines for five years, had never been to an airshow, so it was neat both seeing him at an airshow for the first time, and getting to hear his stories about some of the aircraft we were seeing.

I took SO. MANY. PICTURES. I know I got some good ones. I’ll add some of the best to the end of this post.

After the airshow, we came home, and three of our friends came over to play a few board games, since they probably won’t make it tomorrow. (Mother’s Day and all.) Which means that at midnight on my birthday, I was laughing myself silly. Tears running down my face and everything. It was a great start to my birthday.

I’m a little sunburned from the airshow, despite putting sunscreen on and wearing long sleeves. It could be a lot worse, though. It was actually perfect weather for an airshow – semi-blue skies while the Thunderbirds (white planes) were flying, and overcast in time for the Blue Angels (dark blue planes) to fly against the light gray background. We managed to almost get to our car before the rain started, so all in all, great timing.

Photos!

A shot you don’t see very often. First show in twelve years to have both teams at the same time!

A C-5B Galaxy. The nose cone opens up as well as the gate in back, to allow loading and unloading of massive amounts of freight and vehicles. Like tanks. Husband flew out of Afghanistan in one of these and did a combat landing in Kyrgyzstan. Which is amazing given how MASSIVE these things are.

This was a rocket truck racing a small plane, with pyrotechnics. I wasn’t expecting the pyrotechnics, so this was a really lucky shot!

Thunderbirds against a spotty sky.

Blue Angels against a more overcast sky, three hours later. I thought I got better photos, but it appears some of them didn’t upload to Google Photos. I’ll have to look through my phone when I have some more time!

One of the other performance teams doing a cool scattering maneuver.