4th July, 2009. Visalia, California.

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4th July, 2009. Visalia, California.

4th July and it's "American Independence Day", this morning we headed out to Exceter, a small town 12 miles from here to welcome in the day. Exeter has a Pancake Breakfast, Market Day, Fun Run and tonight a Fireworks display, all to celebrate the day. Nice country town feeling, everyone friendly and a great breakfast - two pancakes, two sausages and coffee all for $5, a fund raiser for a local church group, the young ones served us at the table and were extremely pleasant. The Americans don't drink a lot of hot tea and when you ask for it they look at you as if you had just come from another planet, even in the Supermarkets you have to search for Tea bags, coffee is another story, you can take your pick and when out you can have coffee a hundred different ways.
Back home in time for the sun to make its mark on us, well over 100F, so to the pool it was, lovely cool down and read a while.
Tonight we went back out to Exeter for the Fireworks display, remembering this country is having hard times at the moment, where do they get the money from for these displays, there are a lot around the area and at around $30,000 US each they must have spent at least $150, 000 in this area alone.
We followed the crowd and ended up sitting in a sports field along with hundreds of others, me thinks these were the cheap seats as we could hear announcements on a loud speaker system coming from over yonder, then the pop up lawn sprinklers came on without warning, the cheap seats were emptied pretty quickly and some people got quite wet (we were lucky).
Lots of entrepreneurs out selling glow sticks and Candy Floss, the Candy Floss was a favourite with the kids.
And on the way home at 9.30 the temperature was still 92F (31c).
Started to pack up today, got a couple of boxes from the park and filled them up ready for shipping (they will stay with the RV).
Up and off towards Los Angeles tomorrow, forever getting closer to our departure.

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