By: Timothy Xia

I had a fantastic 4th of July experience. We planned on going with my sister’s friends to watch fireworks in Almaden Lake Park. It was pretty confusing for the parking and we were looking for the others. They said they were at the food court of the Westfield mall, so we hurried there hoping to find them. It took a long time to find them, and we were just walking around the mall trying to follow the signs. We were very tired from all the walking, but I got a smoothie and I was very happy. We finally found them at the Food Court and started ordering dinner. There were a lot of restaurants there, so I got Panda Express, my sister and my mom got Bento, and the others got Popeyes. After finishing our food, they wanted to walk around the mall, which I didn’t really like, especially since we already walked so much. Even though it was tiring, the mall had a lot of different shops and some activities like H&M, Ranch 99, and Target. But there was nothing that interested me. We went to the lake at about 8:15 and found a parking space. We went to the park and we saw hundreds of chairs on every side of the lake. In fact it was so crowded that we walked for about 3 minutes before finding a space to sit. We heard from the announcer that the firework show started at 9:30 and it was only 8:30 at that time. We tried to kill time by telling each other jokes, but it wasn’t really helping. At 9:30, the first fireworks were shot out, followed by many more. They were really loud and I could even feel the vibration with my legs. But all the fireworks were really colorful. Every firework has a certain color like green, blue, red, and purple. It lasted for about 30 minutes and after that, my neck hurt. After the show, there was a lot of traffic and there was a vegetation fire that made things worse. We finally got onto another road and got home at about 11:30. I was so tired that I fell asleep as soon as I hit the pillow.

Image Credit by Yaroslav Shuraev88