Goose & Whit's Wild Ride

mile 6373
Note: I wrote this last night but didn't have time to post it until now.

I finally arrived in St. Louis about an hour ago, but seven hours ago I was taking in what is without a doubt the most impressive museum of this trip. I ate dinner last night at a bar a couple of doors down from the Columbos, OH motel where I was staying (amusing sign sequence from their parking lot shown below), and ended up discussing my trip with a nice couple (also motorcyclists) who sat down next to me at the bar. I mentioned that I was planning to catch the topiary garden in town (I've started using this website to look for interesting sites on my route) and the Motorcycle Hall of Fame a few miles east, and they clued me in to the National Museum of the United States Air Force, which is in Dayton, a half hour or so west of Columbus. I've been a huge fan of military aircraft since I was a kid, and if I had had any idea that museum was there I would already have been planning to visit.

So I dropped by the topiary garden (it features sculpted hedges that mimic Seurat's famous Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte painting), which wasn't in the best shape and was therefore a little underwhelming, then the moto museum, which was interesting but didn't contain enough sportbike exhibits to really thrill me all that much, then moved onto the AF museum, where I was in heaven. I wish I had gotten there before 3 PM because I honestly could have spent all day there and not gotten bored (and I didn't realize until it was too late that some of the famous experimental planes that I would love to have seen were in a different building nearby). The Air & Space Museum in DC is terrific, but the NAFM puts the Smithsonian collection to shame. Included were planes that I had built models of, planes that I had flown simulators for, planes that I had watched documentaries on and a host of fascinating planes that I had never seen or heard of. Among my favorite exhibits were the SR-71 Blackbird, the F-22 Raptor (I couldn't believe they actually had one), German jet and rocket planes that could have turned the tide of WWII, Bockscar (the plane that dropped Little Boy and Fat Man on Japan, of which they also had replicas), and an F-4 cockpit that you could sit in (I swear I could have sat in that thing for an hour daydreaming about dog fights and supersonic flight). And shown at the end of the large collection below is the stupidest looking plane I've ever seen, the "snoopy nose" C-135 A/RIA.

P.S. - My apologies to Aunt Jean for poking fun at her suggestion that I visit friends of hers in Illinois in order to meet their daughter. I hadn't really planned the return trip at that point and didn't realize that I would in fact be going through Illinois after all, so it would not have been a hundred miles out of my way (but I still wasn't inclined to make that particular stop).