4TH: A friendly suggestion

I am often a visitor to your beautiful city. Surely it is one of the loveliest and most precious places in all of God’s rich and varied creation.

Other times while visiting, I have often wished for the opportunity to be present for the fireworks set off across your exquisite lake for the Fourth of July.

Since I have extended family now living in the area, this most recent 4th I had the wonderful opportunity to do just that.

We had a tremendous time watching! The fireworks were breathtaking! We sat along a section of the dike behind North Idaho College. It was such fun to watch families enjoying the water, the beach and the ambiance. We had parked in the NIC parking lot that is near a large classroom building, along with many other folks. (It is kind and commendable that the college shares its parking lots for this beloved community event.) As you can imagine, there was a pretty bad crush of activity as families got ready to leave at the end of the event.

In our area, cars were trying to leave from three lines that fed into a bottleneck. We were there quite a long while. Of course, even after such a beautiful event, people are quite tired as most spend a long, busy day celebrating the 4th holiday.

We waited and waited and waited, slowly working our way up to our turn to squeeze through the bottleneck. People were pretty patient but it would have been ever so nice to have a volunteer with a flashlight directing the traffic in a more efficient way.

We did see traffic personnel in a few other areas helping.

I hope next year someone can assist in the three-way to one-way spot we were in. After our 45-60 minute wait in the NIC parking lot, we had to drive another 60 weary minutes to the delightful town of Harrison before gratefully rolling into bed!

Thank you for all the coordinating that must take place to create such a happy memory. The coordination just needs some tweaking.

C. HOWARD

Caldwell