The Dilapidated Marco Luethy Weblog

Published Thursday August 19th, 2004

Sunday, August first was Switzerland's sort of Independence day equivalent. We did not do a whole lot during the day, just lounged around and relaxed a bit from a pretty busy week. At 1700 we all left our apartment and walked for around 90 minutes up a lower alp. Around 90 minutes in there was a little fire-pit where i planned for us to eat dinner grilling sausages and suchlike. While walking, almost near the fire-pit a man stopped me, and started talking to me. He was a farmer who the land surrounding us belonged to. He asked us not to fire fireworks on his land because in the past year's he'd always find it in his fields months later, and it would get into his cows food. So, we chatted for a while. I asked him where he suggested we should, or could set off fireworks and he told me of a clearing in his forest where we were welcome to launch our fireworks. It turned out that this location was even better than the one i had planned for. I thanked him, and we said goodbye.

We reached the fire-pit where we made a fire and started to grill. I got a long stick and sharpened the end into a point on which i was going to place a sausage and hold it over the embers of the fire. Adam and Raymond did the same thing. Kate, bragging about how she had dealt with cooking over an open fire before in girl scouts of who cares what placed a grill which was near the fire-place and placed sausages on it. I can't say that those sausages ever really looked well cooked. However, mine, from my stick was delicious. Mm-mm.

After dinner we started to play around with our many, many fireworks. As it got darker we started to fire off the bigger, louder things we had. We played a lot with bottle rockets and little flaming ball launchers. We fired them at each other, and had a good, grand ol' time. When it was completely dark, night only illuminated by the full moon, we could see out over Switzerland from our high vantage point. We could see straight across into Germany. We saw large bon-fires lit on the various mountain tops in a very Lord Of the Rings, "Light the fires to renew the old alliances" way. We could see many other peoples fireworks exploding in the sky, and I'm certain many, many more saw ours because we were so high up. It was a whole lot of fun.

Raymond set off a home-made, gigantic dynamite bomb which just made a loud noise and exploded. I have videos from Wes. That was awesome. Tyson then set off a huge firework which shot 6 loud explosions into the sky. Was all very fun and awesome. Towards midnight we had run out of things to set off into the air. Around CHF 400 launched off into the sky. We began to walk back home. Raymond, Tyson and I got separated from the rest who had walked ahead of us. Tyson kept taking various photographs of the night with the moon and such, and Raymond and I stayed with him. It was very nice to walk down from this lower alp in the middle of the night in the dark. Our path only lit by the full moon. Erie at times, but a lot of fun.

Down back in Wasen, near my uncles farm we crossed paths with my cousin Mirjam and her friend. They had been walking around watching various peoples fireworks. We chatted briefly and then continued on our way back to our flat. When we got home, some showered, and the rest hung about. Bedtime came about shortly thereafter.

Sunday: Videos of our explosions.

Here are some videos Wes took on his camera from the night of August 1st. Thing's that go bam are fun.
5.6 MB XviD video	1.4 MB XviD video	2.9 MB XviD video
* Videos require the XviD codec. Get them from xvid.org or search on google for the "K Lite Codec" package which includes the XviD codec binary.