SO, WHERE WAS I?

It’s been more than a while since I last posted to the Blog.  We were in Niagara Falls with Mom, just finishing our bus tour of Canada, and ready to head east in the rig for our stay in D.C.  Yikes.  That was last May.  It’s now February as I write this.  No reason for the layoff other than sheer laziness.  The problem now is that, while I have photos of the rest of that trip, the daily events have mostly faded from memory.  Of course, these days, I don’t have to wait eight months for that to happen.  I’ll have to rely on a sketchy journal that Loni kept, and whatever jogs the memory from the photos.

May 15, 2012.  Leaving Mom in Indy, we set off at 9:15 to visit Loni’s cousin Marion in Union, Kentucky, which is just over the border from southern Indiana.  It was an uneventful drive down there, although the GPS, in bypassing Cincinnati, guided us over some pretty narrow roads on the way to her door.  She has a lovely home, with a ginormous finished basement (really, you could hold community meetings down there), and a greenbelt view out the back.  Loni and Marion hadn’t seen each other in many years, so a lot of catching up to do.  She set out a dinner-sized scrumptious lunch where we were joined by her son, Don, and his wife Pam.  We were stuffed to the gills (cheesecakes for dessert!), and wouldn’t need more than soup for dinner.

We had to apologize for “eating and running,” but we needed to head back north towards Dayton and our time travel through the age of flight.  We stopped overnight at the Frontier Campground in Waynesville, OH, so we could be poised to hit Dayton as soon as the museums opened.

Dayton was the location of the Wright Brothers bicycle business where they began their astounding pursuit of a flying machine.  Dayton is also home to the U.S. Air Force National Museum, where we could review pretty much all the aviation era post-Wright to the present.  This turned out to be a great double play.

We hit the Wright Brothers first.  Their shop, which actually was their fourth location in town, stands on it original location in the West end of town.  Next door is the museum devoted to their flight exploits.  I have to say, it was pretty neat to be standing in the shop where the brothers actually worked 100 years ago.  No photos were permitted inside.  There’s not a whole lot to see there, but that connection with the past was strong.  They’ve either left the originals, or have repaved the streets outside, with cobblestones, giving the area an old-timey feel.

The neighboring museum only allowed photos in a couple of restricted areas, so can’t show much there.  It was well worth the visit, though. 

These guys were both geniuses and stubborn, dogged, driven men.  Their lab books are filled with complex math calculations.  They didn’t go to college (heck, they didn’t graduate from high school), so how did they learn this stuff?  They found, by trial and error, that the accepted math (French, I believe) of the day on lift was all wrong, so they painstakingly observed, recorded, and rewrote the entire subject.  They even built their own wind tunnel to conduct experiments.  The original is on display at the AF Museum, see below.  You come away in awe and wonder that two guys from the sticks, through their own brilliance and determination, launched the foundations of aeronautics.  In addition to being bicycle mechanics, they also spent years as printers, with equipment they used again on display.

After an hour or so, we decamped for the Air Force Museum on the outskirts of town. 

The place is huge and I have dozens of photos of neat planes and artifacts.  I can only provide a taste here, but we had a great time.  We just missed the last two seats on the 11:30 tour of the presidential planes.  The next one, at 1:30, competed with a museum tour we also wanted to take.  Much fuming on my part while Loni waited patiently.  We opted for the 1:30 presidential one, and toured the rest of the museum on our own.  The displays were very nicely documented, so I don’t think we missed any pertinent details, but probably there were some guide stories that we didn’t get.  We saw Eisenhower’s plane, Kennedy-Johnson’s AF1, Roosevelt-Truman’s “Sacred Cow,” and others.

In the collage below, Sacred Cow is upper left, at lower left Eisenhower’s beautiful Constellation, “Columbine,” is the silver job in the back, and the mugging Nixonette is in front of AF1 (SAM 2600).

They had the original of the Wright Brothers’ wooden (!) wind tunnel on display:

There were tons of craft on display, so I’ll just show a few of them.

Oh, yeah.  Food report.  Not much to say.

At 3:30 we had to be on our way to Columbus to meet Loni’s roommate from her freshman dorm, Janie.  Janie left Stanford after her first year to come back to the Midwest where she graduated summa cum laud from the University of Ohio; the two hadn’t seen each other or even talked in over 40 years.  Janie recently had contacted the alumni association to see about reconnecting, and so here we are.  We thought we had left plenty of time for the 75 mile trip, but . . . First, Loni (ahem) misread the map, and we missed our freeway onramp out of Dayton – twice!  Then, about 1/2 mile from the exit we needed in Columbus, the traffic came to a standstill.  Worse than L.A.!  It took us nearly an hour to get from there to the Alum Creek State Park where we were to hole up for the night.  Some days you just should stay in bed.

But, the day ended on a good note.  Janie drove out to the park, picked us up, and we had a lovely dinner at the Bravo Restaurant.  The two girls talked nonstop as if they had just said goodbye yesterday.  No awkward silences.  Heck, no silences at all!  Loni says she learned a lot from Janie that first year:  how to dance, how to dress, how to land me.  I made that last up.  Now the two of them are on the lookout for their third roommate, Katie.