Fourth of July is a big day for Americans to sit back and take a breather and relax, right? Unfortunately it means that everyone will ruin the second half of their afternoon fighting traffic to get a spot under the umbrella of one of America’s great fireworks shows. This year we had the chance to watch a fireworks show from the balcony of a skyscraper.

A friend of a friend has a 23rd floor condo in the W Residences tower in Raleigh, a hotel/condo complex not unlike the once-planned Soleil Center, but in Austin’s downtown. Austin features a waterfront fireworks display each year, and people come from far and wide to get a spot in the symphony’s field on the banks of the river, on one of the downtown bridges, on top of a parking garage, a spot on the sidewalk, or even in a kayak on the river itself. The number of programming options was fascinating, especially from a birds-eye view.

The show itself was nice. While higher and more elaborate than Raleigh’s downtown fireworks shows, the production wasn’t close to the show quality typically executed on Wilmington’s waterfront. That one is a show . Nevertheless, it was great to get an elevation reference during a show like that. The fireworks were bursting at an altitude only slightly higher than our perch, perhaps near the 30th floor’s elevation.

Life up in a $2M+ highrise is certainly not like that in suburbia, and I felt myself wondering I could really live in this incredible space. My only experience living where I couldn’t put my feet on the ground in fewer than 10 seconds was in college, and I hated it. This condo was different, and looked like something from an issue of Dwell. My wife and I got to spend time just sitting on the ball-burningly-high balcony, and in a few seconds we ironically felt an overwhelming sense of calm watching the dozens of other fireworks shows out on the horizon. The experience isn’t that different than that from West at North or from the PNC Plaza Condos, but for us the experience was a nice escape and marks as one of our most fun 4th of Julys on record.

While all of Austin comes out of the woodwork for this show, we were surprised that beyond this spectacle, 4th of July is a low-key event in the city. We didn’t see many flags at all; no “sale-a-thons”; no giant flags. I guess that’s more of a Dallas thing?

We poked around the surrounding blocks of downtown a little later, and surprisingly, the bar scene was dead. So we headed back to our friends house, and couldn’t resist stopping at the Taco Cabana for a quick taste of a different Mexican fast-food chain experience. The Cabana is better than Taco Bell, but the fillers of the tacos are not better than Moe’s. What is fantastic about Taco Cabana is the corn tortillas. I’ve written this ad nauseum, but for some reason people in Raleigh know very little about soft corn tortillas. Even most nice, talked-about, chic “Mexican” places in downtown and Cameron Village, for instance, aren’t keeping up with the tortilla level of even Taco Cabana. Gonza Tacos is one of the few exceptions in Raleigh. If we could be like Austin in just one way, my first pick would be for Raleigh restauranteurs to learn how to make good corn tortillas.

How did a discussion about America’s 236th birthday boil down to a diatribe on the bread of Mexico? If you have to ask…

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