Our annual fiesta spans two days. Each day, there is a mass at the local church at about 1:00PM. A few rockets are fired off after the mass, while the folks are going from the church to the fiesta site, which is nearby. The fiesta main event won't begin until after dark but an afternoon session gives the folks a couple of hours to have a drink and preview (prehear?) one of the bands that will be playing that night. The people then go home, have their (late) lunch and rest up for the evening's festivities, which don't really get rollin' until 10:30 or 11:00 PM and which will run until 4:00 AM or so the following morning. Sometime during the afternoon, the professional fireworks company will shoot off well over 100 loud skyrockets - in a span of just a couple of minutes. During the evening festivities, more rockets will be fired, seemingly at random.

The events described above will be repeated the second day of the fiesta.

These guys are local pyrotechnics specialists who serve most of the communities around here. In this picture, they're loading a rack of 25 rockets that will be fired off in quick succession, along with several other identical racks.

Some of the rockets are "MIRV'd" with multiple warheads. Others just have one large explosive charge each. Each warhead is about an inch in diameter and about seven inches long and is attached to a long, thin bamboo stick.

Here the guys are setting up the rocket racks. They're some distance from the fiesta site - for reasons of safety.

On the first fiesta day, they set up seven of the 25-rocket racks, plus three 4-inch (diameter) "mortars" each containing multiple extra-loud charges. On the second day, there were twice as many racks of rockets and four mortars.

Here's what it looked like from our bedroom window when the rocket firing first began on the first day of the fiesta. It looked about the same on the second day, except there were twice as many explosions.

When all the racks were fired off in rapid sequence from a single long fuse, it sounded like we were under a carpet-bombing attack.

If you're a dog owner, you'll understand when I tell you that our three dogs were a bit upset at all the noise. Matilda, our largest, normally stays downstairs but demonstrated how fast an old, overweight dog can scurry up the stairs if she's afraid to be alone. The two smaller dogs sought out dark places to hide. One hid in the corner of a walk-in closet. And little Otto, who's getting on in years, went into a trembling mode that lasted until well after all the noise had subsided.

During both day's firings, it was fairly raining bamboo sticks all over the place. Fortunately, the sticks are very light and just sort of drifted down too slowly to hurt you - unless you got hit in the eye.