Signs of Fall

Sunday
It was looking quite Fall-like in certain sections of the bike path this afternoon, with all the fallen leaves on the ground. The leaves are beginning to fall early this year after our hot dry summer - we are now 8 inches behind on rainfall for the year. They had forecast rain for this weekend (a holiday weekend), with the earliest chance yesterday evening - courtesy of the remnants of Hurricane Isaac. We never really got any until this evening - lousy timing, as it was about an hour and a half before the huge firework display in downtown Cincinnati on the river - the fireworks are actually on barges on the river, and also on a couple of the bridges. Laura and a couple of her friends had gone down in the afternoon, and they ended up getting drenched, but having already got soaked, decided they may as well sit it out and wait for the display. We, on the other hand, left around 6.30, managed to park the car relatively close, and went to get something to eat before heading to the riverfront. The rain started as we were walking down to the river and Roger suggested we took shelter in the porchway of one of the big buildings, right across from where we had parked the car. I'm so glad we did, as it was quite a downpour, and the wind picked up and so the rain was coming almost sideways. We stuck it out for quite a while but it didn't show much sign of abating, so we decided to give up and go home. The rain did eventually stop, or at least reduced to a fine drizzle, and the fireworks went off as planned, but to a much smaller crowd than usual. The event usually draws around 500,000 people on the two sides of the river.