love is a battlefield.

Our initial plan for Saturday morning was to get up at 8AM and make the 2 hour drive down to Hastings for the Battle of Hastings event.

If you know us at all, you can probably guess that it didn't happen that way.

Not only do I loathe the morning, but since I am still battling with my sickness, the mornings are when I feel the worst. So it was hard for me to drag myself out of the warm bed. But eventually I did.

So anyway, by about 11:30 AM we made it out of the house. We got stuck in some traffic but we finally made it to Battle at around 2:30PM. I kind of felt guilty because I knew that Taylor was really looking forward to the battle reenactment that only takes place once a year, and I figured we'd already missed it. The event for the day was supposed to go from 10AM - 4PM. So when we got our tickets and program we realized that the reenactment was the LAST event of the day and started at 3PM, so we got real lucky. And I was actually glad we didn't get there at 10AM cause I don't think I could have hung out there for 5 hours.

To me, it wasn't actually that exciting, but it was pretty cool, and as always, it makes me happy when my husband is happy and I think he enjoyed it. 

Here are some pictures to help you feel like you were there with us.

If you're a girl, you probably think is boring. Sorry.

So then we went into Hastings because we just wanted to see the coast one last time. So we drove into town only to discover that we were there the same night as their huge bonfire night.

They have this big bonfire society and they do this to celebrate the Battle of Hastings as well as the downfall of Guy Fawkes, who tried to blow up parliament. (Remember, Remember the 5th of November) So they were having a big old carnival on the seaside, and then they had a parade with torches, not unlike an angry mob, and then they lit this huge thing on fire.

i guess they don't know about burning crosses and how it's not kosher.

 and of course once Taylor learned about this, he NEEDED to see it. Which I was fine with, at the time. SO we walked around and stopped for dinner then walked around some more then waited on the street for the parade. It was getting colder and colder and I was getting more and more impatient, and sicker and sicker and

BOOM!

There was a huge boom that rang in our ears and everybody screamed. I looked around to see if there was any indication where it came from. I had initially figured it was part of the parade. 

Then we quickly learned that some idiot teenager kid threw a firework, not unlike an M80 behind the crowd, and it landed right behind us and right next to a lady and her two small children. Luckily no one got hurt, except the guy standing next to us got hit in the leg and it was swollen up pretty bad. He had a pretty good attitude about it but everyone was really mad. The police came but the kid had already taken off. If I had children there, that kid would have gotten his face smashed into a car windshield long before anyone was able to report it to the police. But I digress. Apparently this kid and his friends had been walking up and down the street dropping these fireworks near the onlookers waiting for the parade. I don't know what kind stupid person does things like that, but apparently they exist.

The nice thing about the incident was it made me forget how cold I was for a minute. 

So FINALLY the parade made it's way down to us and it was cool for a second, but then it got really repetitive and a little too loud. They were pushing these tin barrels and kept throwing exploding fireworks in them. So after I begged Taylor finally agreed that we could go, luckily he was also cold. So we had to figure how to get across the parade of fire people to get to the car park. This was really tricky because A) I am pretty sure it's not allowed to walk across them and B) There is A LOT of fire and a lot of explosives going on (which is so stupid and unsafe.)  

So I am standing on the side of the road waiting for a break when another firework goes off right in front of me, but the genius missed the barrel so it just exploded all up in our faces and I got hit in the leg with some piece of something and it hurt SO BAD. At that point I was mad at the entire British population and my adrenaline was going a little bit so I weaved through the crowd (Taylor following) to find a break in the parade to run across. At one point I heard Taylor yell "LOOK OUT!" from behind me and another explosive went off. We saw a break without fire or explosives and ran across as some people yelled at us about how we couldn't do that. But I didn't care. They were all idiots to me at that point, and they can't tell me what to do.

Smokey the bear needs to get his rear in gear and get over here and teach these people about fire safety.

We have a video of most of the parade but I am too lazy to wait for it to upload. SORRY. but here's a video from the parade two years ago that I found on youtube. it's the exact same

5 Days until we come HOME!