Boston's 4th of July

Hello again. While we had the momentum going we thought that we should also post our pictures from the 4th of July. We spent most of the day going down town to look at the "Tall Ships." In short, lots of tall ships from around the world sail in to Boston every 4th of July. This year was special because it was the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, and the USS Constitution, which was used during that war, is still afloat in Boston's harbour. There were ships from Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Indonesia, and of course our USA. The ship that I was most excited to see, a near 400 foot vessel from Russia, never made it, but we still had a good time.

 In the above and below picture, it was extremely bright out, despite the dark clouds in the background, thus the squinting.

 This beauty below is from Brazil. I don't remember the name, but I do remember that it was pretty darn cool.

 This ship is the only one we boarded, and it was from Indonesia. I believe it was crewed by sailors from the Indonesian equivalent of the Naval Academy. There was a chart on deck that mapped their route, and supposedly it took them around 70 days to reach Boston from Indonesia.

As you can see, it is quite crowded. When we decided we had had enough, it took us about 10 minutes just to get off.

 I would have loved to check out this ship, just because it looks so cool, but we didn't know where it was docked.

Below is the USCG Eagle. It used to be called the SSS Horst Wessel, and was christened by Adolf Hitler himself. It was named after a famous Nazi, who among other thing wrote the song that was their national anthem. After the war, the US acquired it, and it is now used by the Coast Guard Academy and Coast Guard OCS for training purposes and ambassador-ish visits. It is one of only two sailing ships in the U.S. military.

One particularly interesting thing for us was that Regina's dad trained and sailed on it to Grenada when he was in OCS for the Coast Guard.

Later that evening, we went to a barbecue with some friends and watched the fireworks over Boston's Charles River. It was a wonderful night, and at the end of the day we were both very thankful for the blessing of living in this great nation.