Today I finally did a touristy thing. I drove out to the air and space museum. It was the longest drive I have taken the Hybrid on so far. Mostly 2-lane highway, but at least the trip out was relatively quick. The trip back was at least a half hour longer due to traffic and construction. If a person actually read every plaque and watched every video clip they have explaining things I think it would take 2 days.
My primary reason for the trip was to see the “Spruce Goose.” I paid the extra $25 to have a flight deck tour and get my picture taken sitting in the same seat “uncle Howard” sat in. Of course I had to wait around until 12:30 for that. I took quite a few pictures with my camera. It is just impossible to get a picture of the “Spruce Goose.” Not because the restrict you, but you just can’t get far enough away inside to get it in focus.
They choose the location for this place well. It is surrounded by an airport and a vineyard. In short, no neighbors to complain as long as nobody trespasses and you have to walk a long way to do that.
This isn’t one large building, but several small buildings spread out. Well, small is a relative term. One of them has an actual Titan missile and decommissioned launch control room and another holds the “Spruce Goose” along with a lot of other stuff. I almost didn’t go over to the space museum having been to NASA as a kid. Glad I did. That is where I found the Titan missile. They even had an actual SR-71 Blackbird in that building. One of the volunteers said it was because that building was climate controlled per Smithsonian standards so nothing would age.
There was a lot there for people who didn’t know anything about planes, space, or the military. They even had a fire arms collection upstairs in one building. According to the information it was the personal collection of the founder of the museum. I gotta tell you, TV and movies makes most of those weapons were ugly. It was a military family which founded the museum so they had quite a few “captured weapons.” I would have _never_ considered shooting the Uzi they had. It looked like a cheaply made hunk of sh*t found on a Wal-Mart shelf. It looked a lot better than the Chinese made SKS they had. I now believe every story I’ve ever heard about those guns killing the shooter roughly as often as they hit the target. If you have ever seen a metal ruler which was stamped instead of being etched you have some idea of just how bad this ruler looked. I swear it looked like every part had been stamped instead of milled.
One nice thing about the museum was they were very good at identifying things which were replicas and which were the real McCoy. They did have quite a bit of replica stuff, but, none of the fire arms were stamped replica. They even had one of the gatlin guns Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders used. Quite a haul since there were only 4.
I had to stop myself when I was walking around the blackbird. There was a college age foreign couple and the guy was trying to tell the girl the blackbird was a stealth plane. I wanted to go tell the kid to read before speaking. There was never anything stealth about the blackbird. It was built in 1960 and is still the fastest thing in the sky. You don’t need stealth when you can outrun every missile anyone can fire at you. I remember the stories which kept coming out during my youth. Every time a country published a faster number they pulled a blackbird out of storage, fueled it up, and chalked up a speed a few hundred knots faster. Nobody really knows just how fast it will go and I would hate to be someone in the plane trying to find out. After Mach-2 those flight pressure suits don’t help. That much I remember.
