A cool thing about living in a military town is that you have parades on Veteran’s Day.

The high-school bands from the area are supplemented by one of the local outfits:

Oddly, the local high schools’ bands were not there. We had 3 HS bands, but none from the Morongo Basin. I only heard one, from Riverside (!). It kept playing the main titles from Nightmare Before Christmas. From what I was told later, the Marines mainly played the Marine Hymn, but during their warm-up they were playing the main titles from Pirates of the Carribean: Curse of the Black Pearl.

Also, parades in towns like this one tend to feature jet flyovers. In this case, the jet was a F117A Nighthawk, the so-called “Stealth Fighter”:

I got this photo about 20 minutes before the parade. The plane made a single circuit of town and then went away again until the parade. I foolishly forgot to be alert for it and sure enough, I had my camera off when it went over for real, much, much closer. These planes are so ugly-cool it will be a shame to see them replaced by the F22 Raptor. I thought they were based at Holloman AFB in New Mexico. I wonder what this fellow was doing in the California desert? Edwards?