Some cool stuff!
I keep saying we should take a trip to Dayton O.
A friend says that is the closed one to visit???
Any day now?
My buddy and I go out of work and drove 12 hours to Dayton to go to the museum once, and we got there too early, so we parked in a nearby parking lot and went to sleep, with empty Dorito bags, depleted soda bottles, and other detritus of a long overnight trip all over the dashboard.
I woke up with muck-mouth and my hair all pushed over to one side, and looked up to see well dressed families with young children staring into our car a they passed. It was Sunday morning, and we were in the parking lot of a church...:)
Oddly, there are so many impressive things in that museum-you would never guess which one made the deepest impression on me...
It was a table cloth that General Jimmy Doolittle's wife had used over the years, and they were apparently big entertainers, throwing parties all the time in their house for the elites of the aviation community.
When people would visit, she would have them use a magic marker and sign their name on the tablecloth. Then, she would embroider the signature with black thread. For posterity. Looking at it was a Who's Who of aviation (and political) history. I recall seeing Orville Wright's signature on it.
It gave me the same feeling I got a few years ago when I went to a small museum in Concord, MA and they had one of the lamps that had shined from the Old North Church in Boston to let Colonials in Charlestown know that the British were sending troops by boat on their way to Lexington and Concord, preceded by Paul Revere on his way to warn them the morning of April 19th, 1775.
That was...history. There was something so real and palpable about it that it filled me with an awareness of the reality of it, just gazing at it.