**Attention email subscribers! Special message for you below**

Confession time!  I’m a sucker for airshows and just planes in general, especially military jets – yes I watched Top Gun one too many times when I was a kid. I, too, had dreams of becoming a Top Gun pilot in the US Navy.  Alas, it didn’t occur to me that I needed to be doing well in school all throughout my high school career in order to even have a glimmer of hope of being a “fly boy” until my senior year… far too late to recover my less-than-average GPA. BUT, when the Smoky Mountain Air Show comes to town, or any other opportunity to check out fighter jets arises, I get to relive that dream, if only for a short minute.

Anyway, Holly and I had been talking about going to the airshow this weekend since we heard about it, but my buddy Ryan happened to mention he was going to try to catch some of their practice runs, so we decided to tag along.  Turns out they did essentially the full show Friday, ahead of the official show on Saturday and Sunday!  It was amazing!  Ryan had done all the homework and found a killer spot that afforded views of the mountains WITH the planes (which seems reasonable given its the Smoky Mountain Air Show and all!) as they were doing their runs, which was perfect.  I had no idea I’d come away with so many images I really enjoyed, but since I did, I’m going to share a good number of them with you!  Big thanks to Ryan for the invite, and to Bob for keeping us all entertained!

More next week!

–Dan Thompson

**Email Subscribers!**

Hey there!  So, funny story, turns out the email delivery service I had been using – Feedburner – got decommissioned by Google back in July, and I just now noticed!  Whoops!  So you many of you have not heard from me in a while.  Hopefully this is all resolved now and you’ll start to get your weekly posts via email again, just like the old days.  Also, hopefully you don’t get flooded with emails here on this first run.  Fingers crossed!  As always though, you should see an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email, should you decide you’d rather not receive them anymore.  Thanks for all the support, and apologies on the dropped ball!