So, what's happened over the past month-plus? Well, I can't remember what I did yesterday, so . . . no, wait, I do know what I did yesterday. I played hooky (shh) and drove down with my boys to McMinnville to visit the Evergreen Aviation Museum and the Spruce Goose! Fun times.
The aviation museum was cool but, I have to admit, kind of a rip-off. They try to get money from you every which way they can. But it's hard to get upset since all the tour guides are odd cute little old Vietnam vets. Anyway, we paid $13/each adult and $11 for one youth (yay, someplace BP is still considered a youth!) and this granted us access to the museum and loads of sweet ancient airplanes, helicopters, and a few other old vehicles (my favorite of which was a bad-ass supersexy Mustang). MP was way into the airplanes.
MP, gazing around the room, excitement in his voice: "Doesn't this make you want to fly??!"
BP: "Umm . . ." (walks away).
'Gizzle: "No, not really."
Much of the time was spent leaving MP in our dust since he was so enthralled with everything. Oh yeah, and me getting a little panicky as I do in large open spaces filled with tons of similar objects in no apparent organized fashion, at least that I can make sense of (e.g., IKEA). Poor BP.
'Gizzle, trying to come up with some sort of order for the visit: "Let's go see the Spruce Goose, then wander around."
BP: "You really want to see the Spruce Goose, don't you?"
'Gizzle (sharing something she really shouldn't with a kid): "Well, BP, I get a little weird in places like this. I get confused and start to freak out a little bit."
BP: "Umm . . . (walks away).
It went something like that. There was this one plane they were giving tours in, but apparently you had to pay extra to go inside. I took major offense to this, since we had just paid $37 to get into the museum. What on earth did we pay that for, if not to view the insides of airplanes?? So I casually looked around me, and then helped myself to walking up inside the airplane. BP had warned me they were "eyeing us," but I just thought he was being paranoid. Sure enough, a couple minutes later, one of the museum guides/vets poked his head inside after me and asked me (nicely) to get out. Oops.
I think the highlight of our visit (pre-Spruce Goose) was this little section that had games. Oh wait, I can complain about this too. After paying $37 to get in, half the games were "out of order." Erg. Anyway, after tooling about with various things (sitting in a one-man plane cockpit, sitting in a helicopter, testing our reaction speeds, etc.), we found some computers that let you similate flying different airplanes. We spent most of our time here, until BP perfected his landing and I crashed my plane so we could move on.
To the Spruce Goose, finally. If you don't know what the Spruce Goose is, and you haven't seen The Aviator (starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Cate Blanchett), I'll enlighten you. Designed by Howard Hughes in 1942-1947, the Spruce Goose was technically named the Hercules. It was not actually an airplane, but a flying boat. It was built with wood due to restrictions on metal use during World War II. One of the museum guides told us it was 95% wood.
Uh oh, email is back up. I'll have to finish this and get back to work. So, the Spruce Goose was designed for the military; however, the war came to an end and it wasn't finished yet. Also, $18 million of taxpayer money had already been spent on it. Hughes went before the president (FDR), who gave him permission to finish it, with two major caveats: 1) he had to use his own money and 2) it was still owned by the taxpayers. Hughes did finish it, spending an additional $7 million of his own. And he only flew it once. Once. He then kept it ready and waiting to fly, with a fully stocked crew, for the next thirty-three years. This cost $1 million per year, for thirty-three years, and he never flew it again. Cray cray!
Some of this I learned from my Evergreen Aviation Museum pamphlet, and some I learned from "Spruce Goose Bruce," a totally wacky old man sitting inside the aircraft. BP and I both noted that SGB said "Let's see" an uncomfortable amount of times. Inside the Spruce Goose, you can look around basically the fuselage of the plane. For a whopping $50, you can go on a "VIP" tour of the main cabin. No thanks. Or, for a slightly less whopping $20, you can get your photo taken in the cockpit. We couldn't have cared less about having our photo taken in the cockpit (all three of us are unfortunately rather unphotogenic), but we wanted to see it, so we forked over the $20 and went up. Here is our photo.
What I forgot to mention is that the Spruce Goose is flippin' MASSIVE. I noticed that pretty much anywhere you went in the museum, you could look up and some part of the Spruce Goose would be directly above you at all times. It is five stories high and has a wingspan the length of a football field. It is 218 feet in length. We're really overdue for a photo here.
Well, I have to get back to work now. Sorry if this was boring; I found it pretty interesting though! If you do make it out to the aviation museum, I'd recommend watching The Aviator first (although our cockpit guide said it wasn't completely accurate) and you should also check out the space museum next door. We didn't have time for both. Oh yeah, and one more attempt at the raping of our pocketbooks: First, the exit (of course) is through the gift shop. Then MP spotted this upstairs gun showroom he wanted to check out. But guess what: It cost another $3 per person, so we skipped it after having already spent $66 at this point. I apologize for all the complaining, I'm just "thrifty" (aka "broke").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spruce_goose
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P.S. "Apologies" are #55 on the list of Stuff White People Like. I noticed I apologized no less than three times in this blog post. Yes, I am white.
