I was reminded by a colleague last week that the weekend of the 11th was the annual Fleet Week celebration in San Francisco. Fleet Week is, according to their site, when the "Bay Area pays tribute to the men and women of our nation's Navy and Marine services." It's really a massive event with well over a million people attending over the weekend.
Mike and I really wanted to go because they usually have a fantastic airshow featuring the Blue Angels. So we got cracking early so we could find a decent place to settle. We got to the Embarcadero at about 9:30am and parked. We had a wander around and looked at some of the ships that were docked.
At 11am they had the parade of ships which featured several Navy Destroyers and Frigates, as well as Coastguard ships and a Liberty Ship which took part in the Normandy landings.
The airshow began promptly at noon with an F-15 and a Bearcat doing some formation flying before the Bearcat broke off and let the F-15 show off for a while. Now I haven't been to a good airshow in years so when that F-15 came screaming by, it gave me goosebumps.
The highlight of the show for me was the Canadian Snowbirds display team. They were phenomenal. By far the best formation display I've seen in a long time, probably since the Red Arrows. The Blue Angels were good, but there were only 6 of them and it wasn't as dynamic and creative as the Snowbirds.
All in all, very good day. Great to see an airshow again!
I tooks some photos with my new camera which you can see at http://www.haebc.com/gallery/FleetWeek
As you can see I'm still getting the hang of my camera ;-)