Lynn - The United States Air Force Museum

Apologies for the delay, the staycationers have been a bit busy lately. We did have one week that had to be skipped, there was just too much stuff going on. Last week, we did make a journey, but it has taken me until now to get anything blogified.

Blogification it is! Last weekend, the destination was the United States Air Force Museum. He denies it, but I think Tim mislead me ever so slightly in order to get me to agree to come. I was anticipating mostly spacey type exploration, NASA and the like. Tim told me this was the "OTHER BIGGER BETTER space museum," the "space" part is the less than accurate part. I wasn't too upset, but honestly... isn't tim ever so clever.

The museum was set up as a tour from the beginning of aviation history to recent aircraft. The place is mega enormous, consisting of three hangars with various other attached buildings. There is even an IMAX theater (the one part of the museum we didn't experience).

Because the museum is a national museum, it has a lot of stuff that is quite intense to look at. We saw the plane that acutally dropped the bomb on Nagasaki, which was crazy to see. But with all the planes, at first you are like oh whatevs, this is a plane, but thinking about where they have been and situations they were involved in, the people who flew them, the people they aided in killing... Its pretty intense.

I was also quite intrigued by all of the actual pieces of clothing/personal equiptment that we saw. In the WWII area, they had uniforms from most of the countries involved in the war, and it was interesting to see the elements of differing cultures put into uniform (Tim was rather excited about the Japanese display which included a sword.

Besides the hangars, there were a few more exhibits in between. There was a hall devoted to the people of the holocaust, a section about Bob Hope and his lifetime of bringing comedy to the soldiers over decades, and a section about the science of flight. Not as wide, but definitely TALL was the final room, the space exploration room. It housed several ridiculously huge rockets, and several small displays relating to the air force's involvement with space. By the time we got to the end of the museum, my dogs were barkin. Its hard to describe just how huge the place is, but look at it this way, a blimp only took up a corner of one of the hangars, and it was atleast 20 feet overhead. Or, going up an entire floor to look at the rockets only took you to about 1/4 the height of them.

Tim has assured me that we will go to the other Ohio space museum soon to check it out. I do look forward to that, and now that we are members of the Ohio Historical Society, we can get in for free, an automatic boost is those tricky staycation ratings. Speaking of which:

STAYCATION RATING:
Funness: **** - Pretty fun, but quite a hike. Bring a power bar, or a wheelchair.
Educationalness: ***** - Basically, you've got the history of the United States through planes.
Cheapness: **** - Free admission, but the giftshop was pricey.
Journeyness: **** - A bit of a journey, but not so long that it became painful
Busyness *** - It was pretty damn busy, and there were a million lil boyscouts everywhere.

Overall **** - Make sure you see this place someday!