The wrong museum

I got off to a slow start this morning. That seems to be my pattern these days: stay up until about 10:00 typing this journal (it takes me about two hours a night), then sleep till 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning, dawdle over breakfast and the morning's email, and get underway around noon.

This morning I slept until 7:30, and woke to a dense fog blanketing the campground. The big hills behind me that had glowed golden in yesterday's sunset were completely gone, as was everything more than about twenty feet away. I thought about taking a picture, but there wasn't much to see.

The fog burned off in an hour or two, and after a lazy breakfast of granola topped with fresh blueberries, I stowed all my gear. Since I'm planning to stay at state parks for the next few days, I took the opportunity to fill up my freshwater tank and dump the other two before leaving. This took awhile—it doesn't pay to work hastily when dumping!--but eventually I waved goodbye to the nice folks at Camp Bell and got back on the road.

In order to get down to Wellsboro, PA, my planned destination, I needed to backtrack, so I headed east on Route 17, past Corning, in order to catch Rt. 15 south. After two and a half days of riding it back and forth, I was getting to know this stretch of 17 pretty well! But my eastward route took me within a couple of miles of Elmira and the National Soaring Museum...and since I only had a short drive to Pennsylvania and it was early in the day, I thought "What the heck? I might as well see the Soaring Museum." So I took the well-marked turnoff from Rt. 17 for "Soaring Attractions."

But here serendipity came into play. As I followed the signs for the museum, I spotted a large shopping center with both a Wal-Mart and a Dollar Tree. I knew I wanted to stop at Wal-Mart to pick up some bulldog clips for my temporary rear blinds—the clips that came with them just don't grip tightly enough to hold them up securely while driving, so the blinds occasionally fall down, obscuring my view out the rear window. And I love Dollar Tree stores—they offer good quality merchandise at a dollar apiece for anything in the store. Besides, I was beginning to think about lunch, and this looked like a good place to stop for a bite.

So I pulled into the spacious parking lot and fixed myself a quick lunch of pasta salad and corn chips. Then I wheeled my shopping cart through the Dollar Tree store and found nine bucks worth of bargains, including some better-than-average quality bag clips for Gertie's kitchen; three ice cube trays that Camping World sells for more than triple the price I paid here (these are special trays, sealed so that water doesn't slosh out while you're driving); half a dozen nonslip jar opener pads in a cheerful red color that will complement both of my kitchens; 50 zipper-lock storage bags in assorted (small) sizes, very handy for storing small parts; and the most bizarrely ugly Pez dispenser I'd ever seen: it looks like a cross between an alien, a housefly and a South American tapir. I was very well pleased with my bargains. I still had to walk over to Wal-Mart for the bulldog clips, but then I was ready to head for the museum.

Ah, but once I pulled out of the shopping center, I was no longer sure which way I was supposed to go. Hey, I get disoriented easily. So I stopped at a gas station, topped off Gertie's tank (it was nearly full already, so it only took eighteen bucks' worth) and then stepped inside to ask the way to the National Soaring Museum. The woman gave me good directions, I followed them without much trouble...and found myself at the National Warplane Museum!

I pulled into the nearly empty parking lot to think. I remembered vaguely now that the signs as I came off Rt. 17 had indicated the soaring museum was in one direction and this warplane museum was in the other. Obviously I had taken a wrong turn, or the woman at the gas station had misunderstood me and given directions to the wrong museum. But as long as I was here...what the heck, I might as well check out the place. I could ask for directions to the soaring museum afterward; surely these people would know. So I paid my seven-dollar admission fee and joined a tour that was just starting—not really what I'd had in mind, but the people were so nice about letting me join the group that I didn't have the heart to decline.

Under ordinary circumstances any aviation museum is right up my alley. But today I was in a bit of a hurry, because I still had to see the other museum, and then drive down into Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, the tour turned out to be quite a lengthy one. Not that there were that many planes!--only about a dozen were on display, plus another ten in various stages of restoration. But the docent, an amiable old fellow named Bill, seemed intent on giving us our money's worth, so the pace was slow. Slowing things down still further was an old chap in the tour group who had some experience in the aviation business and delighted in showing off his knowledge by playing "stump the professor" with our guide. "Every hear of a DC-2 1/2?" "Know why this part is called 'the onion'?" "Did you know that the 'Hood' was actually sunk by the 'Prinz Eugen,' and not by the 'Bismarck?'"

To be fair, his anecdotes really were interesting—our guide was certainly eating up these tidbits. Under other circumstances I would have too, but...my feet and legs hurt, it was getting later and later in the day, it was obvious that I wasn't going to make it to the soaring museum, and I was beginning to wonder whether I'd even get to a campground in Pennsylvania before dusk. Maneuvering Gertie into a campsite in the dark is not my favorite thing to do!

We spent quite a lot of time talking with a gentleman whose personal (!) MIG-15, purchased on the cheap as surplus from Poland, was undergoing restoration. He had been working on it for 8 years, he told us, and from the looks of it I'd say he had another 5 or 6 years to go. He and the know-it-all fellow had quite a detailed discussion of the merits of various kinds of rivets, and the types of bucking bars needed to install them properly in various odd corners of the aircraft. The rest of us stood around and waited for them to get through. I tried a few photos, but the hangars were for the most part so poorly lit that it was almost hopeless.

My one consolation was that I did get to see a couple of sailplanes after all. Hanging from the ceiling in the main hangar was a Schweitzer LNS-1, a close relative of the Schweitzer 2-32 trainer that I had flown in when I was a member of the Princeton University soaring club back in the mid-Seventies. (In fact, I thought at first that the aircraft shown here was a 2-32—to all appearances the LNS-1 was identical.) I never soloed—I was laid off from my job, and had to quit after only a dozen flights—but I remember the old 2-32 with affection. It was a very forgiving aircraft, perfect for a beginner.

The museum also had a pretty little sailplane that was commissioned by the US Navy as a glider trainer during WWII: a Pratt-Read XLNE-1. The two-place model on display here set a world altitude record for multiplace gliders in 1952, soaring to 44,255 feet. Not bad for a plane without an engine! It would be stretching it to call either of these a warplane, so technically they were out of place here...but I wasn't complaining.

Finally after close to three hours the tour kind of petered out. Most of the people wandered off, while the chap with all the anecdotes stayed to unload a few more. I hung around a few minutes, wanting to thank the tour guide, but he and the other chap were deep in a discussion of the intricacies of coaxing the best performance from a 1944-vintage Junkers Jumo turbojet engine (if you extend the onion, you see, you get more power—but let it go too far and you risk a flameout)...so eventually I gave up and wandered off myself.

Out in the parking lot I made plans. It was after 4:00; I needed a park I could get to in two hours or less. I set my two Powerbooks—the 1400 that serves as Gertie's navicomputer, plus my all-purpose G3/500—side by side on the table and called up Pennsylvania's state parks website so I could review the available state parks in the area south of Corning.

I did this without benefit of an internet connection, thanks to a nifty trick of Internet Explorer's. Although my cell phone modem is way too slow to be practical for web browsing, before leaving home I had captured Pennsylvania's entire state park website using IE's "Web Archive" feature, so now I was able to browse their site just as if I were online—only much faster, since all the files were stored on my hard drive.

Ole Bull State Park (named after "Ole Bournemann Bull, the famous Norwegian violinist who toured this country in the 1850's," says the brochure) fit the bill: two hours away, with plenty of campsites (some even had hookups, not that I needed them), and in the general direction I wanted to head: southwest toward the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania. I started off, trusting in Street Atlas's step-by-step directions to get me there over half a dozen small county roads—and for once, it did.

The route was wonderfully scenic: a succession of two-lane highways winding through rolling hills (if you're a westerner) or mountains (if you're an easterner) washed by the late afternoon sunlight, with trees just beginning to turn colors that in two or three weeks will no doubt be spectacular. I passed through a succession of tiny towns as the road wound upward into the hills, causing me to yawn every few minutes to clear my ears.

Then the road got narrow—just a two-lane cut in the face of a steep hillside—and I noticed that the barrier along the roadside was the old post-and-wire-rope type that I remembered from my childhood. At the time it was installed, this stuff was probably just about strong enough to stop a Model T from running off the road, but now the cables were drooping and the posts were leaning backward as if just about to slide down the steep slope themselves. I knew that Gertie's five tons would tear through them like a brick through cobwebs, and glancing to my right I could see that it was a long way down. I drove very carefully for the last half hour of the trip.

A little after 6:00 I reached Ole Bull State Park. Nobody was home at the ranger station, so I filled out the usual "honor system" form, stuck my $14 in the envelope and slipped it into the slot. The park had only a handful of campers—maybe 10% of the sites were occupied—and I picked out a nice spot in a grove of huge pines. Unlike Buttermilk Falls State Park, where I was in a dense forest that was very dark, Ole Bull's campground has groves of trees separated by grassy areas, so even at twilight it seemed much lighter than Buttermilk Falls had during the day. Actually, it reminds me a little of the campground I stayed in at the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. It's very pleasant here.

As I leveled Gertie, I could smell the sweet aroma of burning pine wafting from a campfire somewhere. I made a quick batch of baking soda biscuits with Parmesan cheese, a favorite of mine. Gertie's oven, which I've only used a couple of times, is still hard to control: it seems to want to either skyrocket to 500° F. or drop to 200°, with nothing in between. It may be that its thermostat is broken. Nevertheless I was able to get six excellent biscuits, and although they were not as evenly browned as my usual, they were delicious. I ate a couple of them along with the leftover potato and kale soup, then typed up this journal. And now to bed!