Today we drove two hours south to Pennsylvania. Our first stop was Raymondskill Falls, a few minutes south of the town of Milford (which itself is about 10 minutes across the border).
Although we arrived early, it was already popular and one of the two car parks was full. We found a spot in the second and started the brief walk through the woods to the falls. The trail was labeled with this scary sign:
Luckily no bears were to be seen 🙂
Mysteriously (considering the full car parks) the path and falls were almost devoid of people and we had the viewing platforms to ourselves. It’s a beautiful waterfall, and has several stages that drops about 40 meters in total.
Here’s a panorama that attempts to show the two distinct main falls, but there are more both above the right one and below the left.
It was lovely, and absolutely worth the visit.
That said, our true reason for the drive was more fireworks! They’re legal year-round in Pennsylvania and there were three stores very close to the border. We visited all of them.
As with previous visits, we were dazzled by the selection. All the stores sell fireworks to professionals as well, so you could buy all sorts of items including launching platforms and even equipment to control remote launching systems. You could even get the required licenses in one shop! (Of course we couldn’t do this, since the laws in our state are different.)
Fireworks can be extremely expensive, especially for items you quite literally set on fire. The most expensive single-fuse item I saw today was this:
It’s an amazing firework (search on YouTube to see one being let off) but $375 gets you a firework that lasts for 41 seconds after you light the fuse 🙂
The priciest item I saw was this:
It’s a box of 120 mortars that requires a launching system (and license) to fire off. Basically it’s a near-professional show in a box! For only $700 🙂
The shops were very busy, and we saw people filling shopping carts with all sorts of items, and I’m sure they were spending hundreds or even thousands. Two young guys behind us in line had five 180-shot launchers in their cart, as well as loads of other stuff, and were talking about going back first thing tomorrow morning to buy a 660-shot launcher that had sold out today!
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On the other hand, items like those above are incredibly cheap. That ‘Saturn rocket’ with 100 shots is under $10, and those 144 bottle rockets were only $5! I bought none of these, since I don’t like firing off noisy, high-flying rockets.
The most unusual items we saw were the first officially licensed fireworks:
I’m sure The King would be proud!
While we avoided anything with ”high flying’ or ‘loud report’ in the description we still managed to spend about $200 today on a large variety of different items (including the ‘Dark Soul’ shown earlier).
July 4 will be fun this year 🙂
