Washington Pyros

I was invited to a 4th of July bash at my coworker's house across the Columbia in Vancouver last weekend. The sole reason he was having a party at his place is because it's the first time he's ever lived in a state that allows every type of firework...except bottle rockets because little boys are stupid sometimes.

Most dinner party hosts ask you to bring a food item. Not Steve-o; he asked us instead to buy some fireworks that had the warning "shoots flaming balls". Oh, my little pyro heart was ecstatic.

We got sparklers out of the way for the kiddies and then we got to the lighter fare. First were ground flowers...ground flowers on crack. Apparently in WA, they attach them to propellers. So you light it, watch it zoom up a good 50 feet in the air and hear it explode as the propeller floats back down. Next up were little 2-inch rockets that went far higher than we expected - somewhere around 75 feet. They shot so far up that it was hard to see it's trajectory. We did see one fly way over their house and into the backyard. Then we broke out the Roman Candles. I've always liked the candles.

Lastly, we busted out...{insert a reverent pause}...the MORTARS!!!

Back in Wisconsin, we had a great party a few years ago where the star of the show was a package of 1-inch mortars. Those make a nice boom, shoot up 20 feet and explode in a nice flower. We had a few this year, but they were far from the star...because we had...4" mortars!

After lighting the first one, we were all a little shell-shocked. It was crazy loud, shot up at least 50 feet, and made a huge flower; none of us had every lit anything that large before. And to think that we had 24 of them in many different colors and varieties! I had no idea that mortars that large were even available for the Average Joe. There were some neighbors who had even larger fireworks, so who knows how large they get. I tell ya though...Vancouver sure is a loud place on the 4th of July...imagine every household launching a city-wide display of fireworks.

The video isn't exceptional, but I knew that Cyn wouldn't believe me about the fireworks unless I had proof...