The USS Alabama is a WW2 battleship that was used for five years, then sat mothballed for another 15 before getting towed to Mobile, Ala., where it became a “museum”. Sort of the martial-maritime version of the Biltmore Estate, except for the entry fee was 82% less and it wasn’t the home/play-thing of a useless trust-fund nerd. If you want to know what a WW2-era battleship was like, this is a fantastic ship-museum. They let you touch a lot of stuff and climb on things.

They also have a WW2-era submarine there, the USS Drum.

As an added bonus, this photo also shows Mobile’s skyline. Seriously, it’s there.

The periscope actually works. You can see the Alabama through it. You can order someone to fire torpedoes at the Alabama, but nothing happens, at which point the fantasy breaks down.

They let you climb up into the conning tower, which is pretty cool. There are also a lot of levers and knobs you can manipulate to your heart’s content (depending on your heart). This would’ve been the greatest field trip ever if I were still in grade school.

Also there’s sort of a flight museum. Or at least, there are some planes parked in a hangar there.

Any color you want, so long as it’s gray.

“See that white plane over there? The one that’s the only legitimately unique thing we have in this place? Yeah, that one. How ’bout you go ahead and throw all those folding chairs next to it. There you go.”

The plane’s a YF-17, one of two prototypes that were originally developed for the Air Force, which rejected them in favor of the F-16. Then the Navy needed something small, so had Northrop re-develop it into the F/A-18 that has since grown up considerably to where it’s now not small at all. Anyway — nice folding chairs. Hope that airplane’s not getting in the way of your spare television set.

Then battleship.

Roll, Tide!

16-inch shells are pretty big actually.

Some day I hope to learn semaphore so I can quit wondering whether a ship is talking about me.

Well he did. And he’s basically the Ted Williams of right-handed pitchers.

Manning my self-selected battle station.

Other things I feel like typing right now:

• The Alabama is a fantastic artifact, especially so given that it was never updated after WW2 and therefore has its 1942 almost completely intact.
• Being allowed to crawl all over it is awesome. For instance, you can crawl into all three of the sixteen-inch turrets. Never done that before.
• Some time I’d like someone to explain exactly what it is that makes up the smell inside a big, retired navy vessel. I’m guessing it’s oil, grease, and seawater, but — it’s just a guess.
• A WW2-era battleship would make for an unbelievable haunted house, I think.
• They claimed that the ship went through 1,000 gallons of ice cream a day, despite having a crew of only (“only”) 2,000. Raises at least a couple of concerns for me.

The Pacific War Museum is the one in Texas. It’s the only one I got left this trip. Sadly. I skipped the WW2 one in N.O. If you’ve been there and it’s great, please don’t tell me now.

Thx,

bkd

And thus the Blue Angels canceled their practice session.

It supposedly rained like three inches in Pensacola that morning, which seems like a lot. We were the top news on the Weather Channel that day. That’s right, The Weather Channel. Which, btw, has some good-looking on-screen personalities.

One day I’m going to find a flag that’s not flying at half-mast. Maybe.

Fiercest of the Navy’s 1920s night-fighters: the Gling.

F8F.

Dauntless.

Come to think of it, we may have already been fighting Japan when they attacked Pearl Harbor.

It’s like a tails and folded wings convention in there.

Navy art. I like the composition.

I am deeply concerned about naval blimpery.

Any color you want, so long as it’s navy blue.

Trainer.

Forever stuck in formation.

It eventually stopped raining.

Chopper row.

Fat Albert: always a crowd-pleaser.

You asked me once, what was in Room 21. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 21 is the worst thing in the world.

Yes, it *does* seem to be listing to port.

Beyond that:

• The museum is actually on-base, which I thought was very cool.
• I think the one thing this museum has going for it that no other flight museum has is the Blue Angels practices. Which get canceled when it rains three inches.
• The museum has some usability issues, for instance: some of the displays are hard to read (see: “gling”); it was difficult to tell what the organization at the museum was meant to be — there are grouped displays, but their locations seem randomly selected; and some of the aircraft did not seem to have signs describing them.
• Dave, our flight line tour guide, was exactly what you want a retired-Marine tour guide to be. Well done, very entertaining.
• For some reason the four Blue Angels displayed in the museum (the old A-4s) are angled in a downward attitude. Seems sort of wrong.
• The other thing this museum has that I thought was unusual and pretty cool was the artwork. They got a ton of artwork and a lot of it rulz — especially the WW2 stuff, which covered subjects I always thought should’ve been covered on canvas, but which I hadn’t seen before. Wish the National Museum of the Marine Corps had had that (seems like it’d be the rightful place for some of these, for instance — or maybe I just failed to notice them there).
• I don’t think this museum quite nailed The Navy’s Big Moment (IMHO, that’d be Midway). I mean, they talk about it, but it doesn’t come alive or command attention the way you’d think it should. IMHO. Always IMHO.

But it was fun. Again, I thought it was particularly great that the museum was on-base.

It was also interesting to me that the base has its own lighthouse (what base doesn’t?):

It keeps PBYs from hitting the control tower, I assume.

Once I got over the lighthouse, I left the base and headed to Warrington, which is where my parents lived when my dad was stationed in Pensacola. This is what the house looks like now:

I like the gully.

Anyway — big day of naval aviation. And it’s still sort of disappointing to go to these places where my parents (and siblings) lived before I was born and then to find them to not be stuck in the era in which my family lived there. I mean, how hard would it be for Pensacola to pull off 1961? Oh well: maybe next year.

bkd

I’m starting to realize that Charleston’s attractions are merely okay. OTOH, it’s been a great, comfortable, *polite* place to hole up for a few days.

That said, here are a few pictures of the same thing each time. (The aircraft carrier is the Yorktown, it was built in 1943 and therefore involved in WWII. Decommissioned in 1970. It smelled like an aircraft carrier.)

Oh, and I forgot to re-charge my DSLR battery, so these were taken with my cell phone, so they’re kind of crappy-looking.

Carrier, flag, Ravenel Bridge (connects Charleston with Mt. Pleasant)

Tailhook, but no scandal.

Hornet is go.

Bridge and Phantom viewed from flight control.

Y’know, I’m not sure I learned anything from this ship. The guy there didn’t know if there were any actual F4F Wildcats left anywhere (theirs was another FM-2). Um. They have a Medal of Honor museum on-board, but it was pretty dull. You do (re-)learn that aircraft carriers are big, complex systems there. Got to see the on-board dentist area. There’s also a submarine that you can walk through (torpedo room, engine room, officers’ rooms, bridge, galley, mess, torpedo room — IIRC).

Beautiful day, though.

bkd

(PS, I *did* learn that Charleston lost their navy base in, like, ’98 or so. Still got the AFB, though.)

It was definitely windy there. The sand is now covered with grass, but sort of only barely.

Tha’s right, bro, you numba one!

The mound from which they did their glider tests in ’01.

The rail they launched from.

Per the signs at the historical site, it took the world a few years to realize the importance of the event. As I become ever more luddite-ish, I’m guessing I’ll start having mixed feelings about it myself.

bkd

I suppose I could have included this with yesterday’s post.

Before my 9:30 tour bus left, I went back and re-considered the museum’s WWII wing, including this C-47 Skytrain.

An Me-262. First second one of these I’ve ever seen in real life (and one of only three currently on display in the US).

‘Course there’s one of these in *every* flight museum, so no need to comment I figure.

It’s not the original X-1, but it’s still a pretty unique plane to have around.

It’s an XB-70 Valkyrie — sort of the museum’s centerpiece (even though it’s a long ways away from the rest of the table). They only ever built two and the other one crashed during a photo shoot. Here’s a photo of one not crashing.

I overhear a lot of conversations. While looking at the XB-70, I overheard:

• “Of course, the Soviets had one of these as well.” (No they didn’t — the movie you’re thinking of is Firefox and it starred Clint Eastwood.)
• “They were also going to build a Concorde, but they never got around to it.” (Yes they did — the plane you’re not thinking of is the Tu-144 “Concordski”.)

Some days I wish I were deaf. Moving on…

I’m guessing the forever-entombed XB-70 and the YF-23 share a sort of kinship. Kind of like the one Teddy Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh had, only without the murderous criminal aspect.

One of two surviving X-15 space planes. A couple of times these guys went into actual outer space (the plane was dropped from a B-52 at Pima Air Museum, although the B-52 was not at the museum at the time of the dropping). Pretty slick.

The cockpit window on the X-15. If you stare at it long enough, it winks at you.

A couple of Air Force Ones before they were called that.

And the props that, well, propelled them.

And a C-119 like my dad used to fly in the USMCR.

Phew. Posting photos on here often feels like hard work. Slow-ish connection and all. You understand. Glad I went back for the second day and the other hangars, wish I’d have arrived in a more plane-centric mood the day before. And that there hadn’t been all those runners.

If anyone’s thinking of going, I thought it might be useful to assemble a list of the must-see planes there:

• The B-29 (Bockscar) — It’s not as famous as the Enola Gay, but it’s got its place in history.
• The Me-262.
• The B-2 — Still not an airframe you’re used to seeing at eye level.
• The FA-117 — Ibid.
• The XB-70 — Worth a visit in its own right.
• The X-15.
• The X-1B.

So if you only got, oh, three hours or so, that’s probably the list to attack. IMHO. If you got another couple hours beyond that:

• The Doolittle’s Raid exhibit.
• The Vietnam POW stuff.
• The B-36 — Not a lot of these left and it *was* the first inter-continental nuclear bomber we ever had.
• I dunno — everything else, I guess.

It’s a good day-long museum, unless *important* running events force you to alter your plans. They made some weird choices at the museum. A lot of the plaques for planes are hard to find, which I haven’t really experienced before. I think they may also have too many airplanes for their current capacity — those hangars feel cramped and I’m guessing this may add to the plaque-finding problem.

And then I was a little baffled as to why they didn’t make a much bigger deal out of the WWII B-17 flights. That’s gotta be the most iconic thing the (Army-) Air Force has ever done, but it felt like a footnote next to Doolittle’s Raid (which was, of course, pretty cool). For that matter, more explanation of the nuclear bombings would’ve been a good inclusion. Maybe they’re just bitter they didn’t get the Enola Gay.

It’s hard to compare flight museums and say where they rank. I’ve been to all the major ones in the US now (Smithsonian, USAF, and maybe Boeing make up the Holy Trinity — feel free to suggest others) and they’re all unique enough. The USAF museum feels a little more biased than the other two — but then, it *is* the Air Force’s museum. I dunno. I think if you combine the stuff on the mall with the stuff at Dulles, the Smithsonian probably wins. But I’m not sure it’s fair to do that. I wish the USAF exhibits had been outside (granted, it’s not December) so you can walk around them more and get a better sense for the plane (the Pima museum is the champ when it comes to that). It’s a shame you can’t get a sense for the XB-70 as a whole due to all the visual and physical “clutter” in the way.

All is well, all is well.

bkd

Anyway — couldn’t park in the museum parking lot, so was directed to a parking space on the grass, right next to the sign that says not to park on the grass. From there, walked to the museum, which was packed with people wearing too-short shorts and limping slowly. Ugh. When the marathon’s over, you should go home and get off your feet. Stop ruining other people’s museum experiences by manning up for your wife and six-year-old who came to watch you jog.

The worst part, of course, is that due to the marathon the museum canceled all their morning tours of the experimental and presidential wings of the museum, which are sort of the most important parts. As a result, by the time I got through traffic, parked on the grass, waded through throngs, and stumbled onto the tour sign-up desk, the afternoon tours were filled up. As such: scrubbed.

I mean, I still looked through the rest of the museum, but — anyway. Here:

History’s second most-famous B-29. It’s a pretty big drop-off to #3.

The MiG 17, NATO Codename: Pig Snout. Not really. It was “Fresco”.

The plane in the bubble. It’s a B-47 Hustler reflected in the aft bubble (window?) of a B-36 Peacemaker (six turning, four burning, none pictured here).

The ol’ B-2 Spirit. The flesh still seems willing.

Got a bumper crop of missiles coming in this year!

But the runners killed this. I dunno. Maybe it was all the driving the day before and *then* the runners. I appreciated the museum more when I came back on Day 66, so I’ll do a bunch of bullet points and stuff on *that* post instead.

Maybe just one note:

• It’s hard to photograph planes when they’re all cramped into hangars like this.

Well it is.

bkd

One photo:

The hangar door with an A-7 looking on.

Basically, it was like the Chino Air Museum minus 30% of the aircraft but housed in a much-cooler facility. And hopefully I figure out something to photograph at air museums before I get to Dayton.

And then Fort Clatsop, which has nothing to do with the Tillamook Air Museum, is where Lewis and Clark’s expedition holed up for the winter of 1805-06. Very tiny, unphotogenic fort btw (thus: not fort photos), but still it was a pretty cool historical place to be and made me think I ought to read something about Lewis and Clark some day. And, similarly, right now I should probably read something about the Revolutionary War so I can feel all informed when I stop in Trenton on my way down to Philly in a month or two.

The place where Lewis and Clark landed their canoes — they probably just tied on to one of those regularly spaced, vertical posts in the water there.

Ende.

bkd

You sure?

Cuz I can do this later if you want.

K, ready?

Themes currently planned into the itinerary:

• The 20 Best Hamburgers (as defined by this article from GQ): SF, Napa, Seattle, Chicago, Ypsilanti or Dearborn, Newport RI, New Haven, NYC (x2?), Philly (x2?), San Antonio NM, and Santa Fe. I’ve hit a few of the others, but if I do all of the above, I’ll only be missing the one in Hackensack, NJ and Hollywood, FL. (I probably won’t hit all of the above — they’re uncomfortably concentrated in a few cases.)
• National Parks  — per the as-yet unpublicized Ninth Itinerary, I’d hit as many as 24 of the 58, including (only?!) 17 that I haven’t visited before.
• “Great Day Hikes” — There was an article about The 100 Greatest Day Hikes in the last Backpacker magazine. I’m not really using that as a checklist, but I like the concept and day-hiking is kind of the skeleton around which the rest of the trip has been planned.
• Military and Flight Museums: McMinnville maybe, USAF in Dayton, USMC in Quantico, USN Flight in Pensacola.
• US Tourist Checklist Stuff I Haven’t Done Before — although, I’m not sure what I’d count under this other than Mt. Rushmore, Niagara Falls, the Statue of Liberty (and I *lived* there even), the French Quarter, and The Alamo. Maybe that’s enough — but if I go just three hours out of my way, I can also see the St. Louis Arch! (Meh.)

Had some other theme ideas also that are sort of in the hopper, although I worry that they’ll get in the way of having an actual semi-relaxing, enjoyable trip. Ah well. They would be:

• Photographing every broken-down farm building that I see.
• Photographing every gas station I tank up at.
• Photographing every state line crossing (so trite).
• Collecting a shot glass (or key chain or baby spoon or hat pin or…) from each state and/or Sehenswürdigkeit.

Any further thoughts appreciated. Unless they’re no good.

bkd