Yellow Springs, Ohio
We changed the schedule a bit, deciding to spend a few more days in St. Louis. Andrew’s mom was going to buy a used Porsche and Andrew helped her with the sale. Ingrid and I stayed at Pam’s and relaxed. The weather was so perfect that I didn’t mind a few more days there.
So now we’re in Yellow Springs, Ohio, which is a convenient six hour drive from St. Louis. I picked this city for its proximity to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force. Also there’s a nice state park where we could stay, with a scenic gorge next to it. We took a pleasant evening stroll along the perimeter of the gorge yesterday. It sure wasn’t what I’d imagined; it was a long, dark canyon with several small waterfalls and pools. It was completely shaded and you almost couldn’t see it through the dense surrounding forest.
Today we went to the museum. Fortunately, we got into the hangars with the Presidential planes and the R&D planes right away. We had to sign up to see these since they’re inside the air force base, not in the museum; also we had to give our IDs for security. We saw several past Presidential planes, used by Kennedy, Roosevelt, Truman, and even Clinton. Queen Elizabeth had flown in one of them when she came to tour the U.S. in 1983. It was kind of shocking to see how sparse and little the first one was, it really just looked like a crappy passenger plane. The planes improved over time but we didn’t get to see a really luxurious one because the last one at the museum was made in 1961, I think. What was really awesome was not the planes themselves, but knowing that I was standing in the same place where some of our Presidents had stood! I could just picture them there, discussing top secret things. I could imagine how nerve wracking and exciting it must have felt to be a part of the crew carrying the President! Even Ingrid was excited to see the interiors and was bounding ahead of us to get in the planes. She liked seeing the cockpits and the kitchens and bathrooms. A couple of the planes even had poker tables!
The R&D hangar was equally impressive. It was jammed packed with all sorts of planes that didn’t make the cut. Several of them underwent successful testing but then something slightly better came along and made it obsolete. One of these planes could fly over 4000 miles per hour, another could drop a missile 100 miles from its target! They were each incredible and I wish we had saved more time for this exhibit as we had to run to catch our bus back to the regular museum.
Back at the museum, we decided to start with the Early Flight/ WWI exhibit. That turned out to be so fascinating and detailed that we used up the rest of our time just in that one exhibit. We learned about how flight was begun, with balloons and dirigibles. I didn’t know the Wright brothers tested their first gliders just 7 miles from where we stood. The progression to war planes, how the military was uninterested in what the Wright brothers were doing, how quickly things turned around once the war began- it was all fascinating to read about. Of course they had the planes there for each part of the story. Andrew and I feel like we stepped into history today; it was so strange to walk out of the museum and back into modern times. Ingrid liked it overall, as much as a five year old could. She bounced around and seemed like she wasn’t paying attention but every so often she’d ask us about what we were looking at and we got a chance to tell her a little bit about history. It’s always funny though when you tell her something very significant, like: “a long time ago, there didn’t used to be such a thing as an airplane, and people had to go by train or car or foot” and she just says: “oh” and then goes off skipping or singing. I know she is too young for a lot of this stuff we’re seeing but I remind myself that it’s OK to go to a place mostly for Andrew and I too.
