The US Air Force Museum

Friday night

When I checked my maps this morning and saw how far away Toad Suck was—about a hundred miles due south of here—I decided to pass it by. I know I won't be staying the night there at the Army Corps of Engineers campground my friend Gen described to me—it's not far enough for a day's drive. And since it's not on my direct route, which takes me more north than south, it's just not worth driving several hours out of my way to see a place that has little more than a funny name.

It's been another long day of driving—240 miles. And I know that RVing should not be measured in miles, but in interesting experiences. On that scale today ranks pretty low. Having decided against visiting Toad Suck, I plowed along across the upper part of Arkansas and the lower part of Missouri, almost entirely on back roads (there are no interstates going the way I want to go). About two thirds of today's drive was on winding country roads with no shoulders—that always makes me nervous, and my hands hurt after those stretches.

I didn't take any pictures today, either. The one thing I wish I could have photographed—but couldn't pull over in time—was the sign that read

(These two small towns are only a few miles apart.)

I'm still working out a balance between driving and sightseeing...and because I'm still feeling a little schedule pressure, I probably do too much of the former. Of course there wasn't much to see in Oklahoma, so I pretty much drove straight though...and then I'm trying to save up a little time so that I can spend two days at the USAF Museum in Dayton. People at other air museums (like Planes of Fame up in northern AZ) have told me that I'll need two days and more to cover the place, as the collection is overwhelming.

Tonight's campground has instant phone hookups. What a luxury! I just snaked a length of phone wire out the kitchen window, plugged in and I was able to call Carol (who's looking in on my cat Marie every few days) and find out how Marie is doing, then get online and send some email. I look forward to the day when all campgrounds have this wonderful feature!

Gertie is still purring along nicely. I'm constantly making little enhancements as I think of them; I stop occasionally at Wal-Marts and Radio Shacks to pick up bits and pieces. I put a pair of little snap-grip holders on the couch wall next to where I sit—one for a pencil and one for chapstick. And I added a battery-powered fluorescent light to the wardrobe to light up the contents, which are otherwise pretty much in the dark, especially at night.

And today I realized that here's a good 12" x 30" x 4" of unused space on the inside of each wardrobe door. Why not put wire shelves inside the doors and make use of that space, the way a fridge door does? So I'm on the lookout for appropriate shelves. I actually bought a single-shelf unit of this type at a dollar store in Oklahoma a few days ago, intending to cannibalize it for its wire for another project. It would be perfect...if only I had had the sense to buy eight or ten of 'em!

We had quite a thunderstorm last night—my friend Silvie would have loved it. And I can hear rumblings right now that suggest another storm is on the way. Yup, here it comes again! Think I'll turn in and try to get a relatively early start tomorrow. It's very cozy lying in bed and listening to the rain patter on the aluminum roof.

Saturday: losing the awning

This would have been a very uneventful day—except for one major event. I spent almost the whole day on interstates, humming along at 60-65 mph. Made 320 miles and don't feel bad at all. Except that...I dropped the awning by the roadside somewhere in Kentucky.

I had been making good time in a light drizzle. Hit a slight (very slight) bump in the pavement and heard a loud clunk on the right side of the coach. Said "What the hell was that?" Looked in the mirrors but couldn't see anything. It had sounded louder than just a drawer opening or stuff shifting around. Did I hit a rock? Didn't feel like it. Did I leave my lower storage compartment open and lose my Lynx Levelers...or worse, my batteries?

Unfortunately, it was three or four miles before I could find a place to pull over safely and get out. I looked down at the battery compartment—nope, still secured. Then I looked up. No awning! The whole thing was clean gone, leaving only the metal shield that overhung it.

I was shocked. I'd been driving for three or four days—over 750 miles—since the accident that seemingly did minimal damage. In those three days I'd hit much bigger bumps than this one—lots of them. All I could think was that the mounting bolts must have been nearly sheared when I scraped the porch roof, but still strong enough to hold on. But subsequent jostling further weakened them until finally they gave up the ghost.

I went back into the rig and thought about what to do. The awning was either on the shoulder or in the woods...three or four miles back. Back up Gertie along a narrow shoulder for three miles? That didn't sound at all safe. Go to the next exit, turn around and come back? I could do that. But what would I do with the awning if I retrieved it? It was already damaged when it fell off, and after hitting the ground at 60+ mph, it was hardly likely to be repairable. And even assuming it could be fixed, how would I carry it? It's too long to get through the doors, so I couldn't carry it inside. And I could hardly strap it to the outside...there's nothing to strap it to. Couldn't carry it on the roof—that's all full of vents and solar panels.

Eventually I was forced to the conclusion that there was nothing I could do but leave it behind. So I continued eastward, feeling guilty about being a litterbug. Then I started thinking about how lucky I was that it had landed where it did—on the shoulder of a deserted stretch of highway. What if it had fallen off while I was passing someone? Admittedly, I haven't passed anyone more than two or three times on this whole trip, because Gertie's so slow—but still...it could have caused a serious accident. I could imagine all kinds of scary scenarios.

I should have deployed the thing and checked it for damage right after the accident, even though it looked fine. But if the bolts were good enough to last for 750 bumpy miles, then maybe I wouldn't have noticed anything wrong even if I had. I should have checked anyway, though. But the truth is I was much more worried about the damage I'd done to the campground's porch roof than the awning, because I had pretty much decided that I would never use it. It was just too complicated to deploy on a one-man basis...even Gary more or less admitted as much when he was demonstrating it to me. It took the two of us to get the thing out, and it was a helluvan awkward operation at that. Following the accident, it had looked fine after I tapped the end cap back in place, and I had thought that at worst maybe it would jam in the unlikely event that I ever did try to use it—if so, no big deal. It never occurred to me that it would fall off!

After I stopped for the night, I checked the Camping World catalog for replacements...and got my next shock. I thought awnings cost a couple hundred bucks. Turns out that for a good one (A&E's Two-Step), the smallest size costs almost $800 installed! I could buy a cheaper type for about $600, but it would be just as hard to use as the one I lost—so I wouldn't use it. Even if I had the Two-Step model, I probably wouldn't use it more than once a year.

My initial impulse had been to just pay the money and get the thing replaced—partly out of embarrassment, I'll admit—but when I think about how seldom I'm likely to want to use it, it just doesn't seem to make sense. Actually, the only reason I care at all is that an awning can be useful to shade the refrigerator in hot weather when the sun is shining on that side of the rig. I could buy a 6' Two-Step window awning that would more than cover the fridge area for two hundred and change, but even that probably isn't worth it. The Norcold fridge has held up pretty well under hot conditions, even in Phoenix.

Look at it this way: I just lightened the rig by 75 pounds.

The other thing I'm wrestling with is whether to tell the insurance company. When I phoned in my initial accident report, I told them there was "minimal" damage to the rig. It's going to sound kinda funny if I now tell them that the whole awning was lost! And I don't really want them to pay for it anyway—I'd only get a couple of hundred bucks, which is not nearly enough to buy a new one, and I don't intend to buy a new one. On the other hand, I hate to lie and say there was no damage at all. I don't want them sending an adjuster out to look at the rig and saying "Where's your awning that you said wasn't damaged?" I'm not sure what to do about this, but I have to call them back on Monday...so I'll have to figure it out by then.

In other news, I'm now only about an hour and a half from Dayton, so depending on whether I try to visit my old friend Kay Tyberg in Cincinnati tomorrow, I should arrive there early in the afternoon. That's good because it puts me ahead of schedule...so I won't have to worry about whether I can afford to spend two days at the Air Force Museum.

And I rigged up a way to get decent music out of the cheesy Delco radio: I velcroed the RioVolt MP3/CD player to the dash and fed its output to a cassette adapter that shoves into the cab radio's cassette slot and fools it into thinking it's playing a cassette, when actually it's reproducing the CDs and MP3 CD-ROMs that I put in the RioVolt player. It works, but has virtually no bass. I was thinking about replacing the radio itself before, but now I can see that I need new speakers much more than a new radio. Not sure what I'll do about that.

I'm back in the eastern time zone (don't know just when I crossed over), and it's 10:00 p.m. And it's been a long day and I'm tired. No hookups at this state park, but considering that it was chockful of happy, noisy camper families when I pulled in, I consider myself lucky to have found a site at all—I thought I was going to have to park at the Wal-Mart up the road! Either this is a very popular park, or maybe it's just because it's Saturday night. Let's see, where was I last Saturday? Oh yeah, Rio Chama RV Park. Well, it sure wasn't full like this!

My shoulders ache...I'm going to bed. It's humid but not too warm, so hopefully I'll be able to sleep well.

Sunday night

I did sleep well. Could have been more comfortable (at least in the early part of the night, before it cooled off) if I'd had a practical fan. The key word is "practical." There is a fan at the foot of bed, conveniently controlled by a switch at the head of the bed...but it sounds like a small Cessna revving up for takeoff. Even with earplugs, there's no way I could get to sleep with that noise level. (There's another fan like it in the rear lounge—just as loud.) Too bad, because it felt good blowing across my body. I'll check with Radio Shack for a couple of 12V muffin fans that I can replace these with—they may not move as much air, but they'll be far quieter! Gotta bear in mind that Lazy Daze was working with Eighties technology...and these fans were undoubtedly the best they could get their hands on. It was a typically nice Lazy Daze touch to include them at no extra cost.

I was in no hurry to get going, since I knew I had only a couple of hours of driving. I moseyed up the road to an outlet mall and Wal-Mart 'supercenter' I had spotted on the way in last night; bought a cake tester (no RV should be without one!) and a half dozen wire shelf/baskets for the wardrobe doors. They cost me $2.89 apiece—three times what I paid for the similar unit I bought at that dollar store! Oh, well. $17 to put shelves on both doors is not outrageous.

I tried to find out the Tybergs' phone number in Cincinnati, but directory assistance only had an A. H. Tyberg, and I knew that wasn't them. Ordinarily I could have called our mutual friend Nan Carpenter, but she's on vacation in Prescott, AZ. Bad planning on my part—I should have brought the number with me. But who knew I'd be passing through Cincinnati? My route on this trip has turned out to be much more improvised than I had expected—which is good, I think.

It felt kind of funny driving through the city I was born in, but have no recollection of. I haven't been in Cincinnati for 50 of my 51 years, and the place has absolutely no meaning for me...but somehow it feels as if it should. Although I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts until I was seven, I don't feel any emotional attachment to that city either. If I feel like anything, I feel like a native of Princeton. It formed my preference for small towns, especially small college towns.

By the time I got through Cincinnati it was early afternoon, and I knew that by the time I reached the Air Force Museum, I wouldn't have much time there—maybe an hour or two, hardly worth doing. So I decided to pick out a campground, go directly there, reserve a place for two nights and then hit the museum first thing tomorrow (Monday). I can spend the day there, then come back here for the evening and leave for Pittsburgh whenever I feel like it on Tuesday. It's only about 260 miles—not too bad.

"Here" is a shabby little campground by Enon Lake. The surroundings are not bad, but the sites themselves are just muddy ruts in the grass, separated by a few bushes. The main attraction is that this is (allegedly) the closest campground to the Air Force Museum—only about five miles away. On the other hand, the $20-a-night cost is high compared to most places I've stayed (and they don't even take credit cards). They do have power and water, but from the overall run-down looks of the place, I didn't even bother to risk hooking up to their water. The power seems OK, though.

I had a leisurely supper and then put in the wire shelves. They're great! I was able to empty out four out of six of the large Rubbermaid storage drawers in the wardrobe. I actually have more storage space than I know what to do with! Besides those now-empty wardrobe drawers, the four upper lounge cabinets are about 80% empty, the space behind the street side couch will be emptied as soon as I get home, and there's considerable space left in the bins under the couches (also accessible from outside).

What I principally need is office-type storage readily accessible...and more storage space in the bathroom. (I put up a hand-towel loop there today, but that was more for convenience of location than anything else.) I very much want to get rid of that awkward shelf that has to be removed every time I shower...but the bathroom is so tight that there are very few places you can affix anything without having it get in your way. I'm hoping that maybe the canvas IKEA hanging storage unit will fit on the inside of the door—that is slim enough, and it's soft so that you won't gouge yourself on hard shelf corners when going through that door. If it doesn't fit, maybe I can make something similar that will.

Monday night

I discovered that one of the drawbacks of the Enon Lake campground is that it's near a rail line. Thus every hour or so—sometimes oftener—a slow freight would crawl through, hooting mournfully and making the ground shake. It seemed as if every time I had almost gotten to sleep, one of these trains woke me up again. Nevertheless I managed to get enough sleep eventually. After breakfast I headed for Wright-Patterson AFB and the Air Force Museum, arriving a little before ten.

The museum was not exactly bustling at that hour on a Monday morning, and that suited me fine. First I spent a leisurely hour walking the "flight line"—planes on display outdoors, ranging from WWII vintage aircraft to a B-1 bomber. There were a few other men checking out the planes in a light drizzle...no women, though. What a pity! I wonder why so few women catch the magic of flying and flying machines.

I went inside and wandered the galleries until it was time for the IMAX movie "Storm Chasers," which featured spectacular footage of researchers flying through hurricanes, plus some truly scary ground-based tornado footage. I had to look away during some parts—not because I was scared, but because I was starting to get woozy from the handheld camerawork. The cameraman had a habit of circling the research team endlessly as they set up their equipment. The circling combined with the slight wobble in the handheld camera would have made me ill if I'd watched too much of it on a screen that size. But other than that the film was excellent. Another McGillivray-Freeman IMAX production, and they always come through with high-quality stuff.

I made the mistake of having lunch in the museum cafe. A chicken sandwich turned out to be a rather minimalist affair: a slab of fried chicken between two halves of something that looked like a roll but was actually closer to Wonder Bread. No lettuce, no tomato, no dressing—pathetic. I would have done far better to eat in Gertie! After lunch I went back to Gertie to swap camera batteries (I always keep a fresh set in the charger) and doff my windbreaker, as the rain had stopped and it was getting to be a drag carrying it around the museum.

The remaining galleries had some real show-stoppers—for example, a mammoth B-36 bomber, one of the largest (and in my opinion one of the worst) aircraft ever built, dominated one hangar, its 230-foot wings (wider than the length of the Wright brothers' first flight!) stretching from one wall to the other. This titanic turkey, which could carry forty-two tons of atomic bombs—enough to kill millions of people—was dubbed the "Peacemaker," in an egregious example of military doublespeak.

Sitting next to the B-36 was a diminutive Goblin jet fighter—another of the worst aircraft ever built!--designed to be launched from and retrieved by a B-36 mothership. (This stupid idea had been tried in the Thirties with zeppelins. It didn't work well then, either.) See that weird-looking structure right in front of the Goblin's's windshield? That's the hook the pilot was supposed to use to reattach to the B-36 in flight. (This was not a matter of choice: the Goblin had no landing gear!) How he could see around the massive hook to fly, much less shoot down enemy fighters, is a question I've never seen answered. Besides, the Goblin's short, guppy-like design made it so unstable in the yaw (right/left) axis that it had three tails, two subtails and two winglets in an attempt to give it some directional stability! No wonder this project never got very far.

I watched a bit of a junior robotics competition in another hangar. It looked as if the contestants were teams of 10- to 12-year-olds, running robot vehicles built of Legos around a miniature obstacle course. It seemed as if the robots were simple line-followers (that is, machines that use optical sensors to follow a black guideline painted on the floor), but I may have been underestimating them. I didn't stick around long enough to find out the details.

In a back corner of the same hangar I was excited to see firsthand a plane I had once worshipped: the Douglas X-3. As a boy, I had always felt that this needle-nosed speedster was just about the sexiest-looking aircraft ever designed. As an adult I learned that it was a disappointment to its designers, underpowered and never achieving its goals. It was one of the rare exceptions to the old-school aeronautical engineer's rule that "if it looks good, it is good." But I have to admit that it was a thrill nevertheless to stand next to the plane, gaze along its unbelievably long, sharp nose and then peer into its cockpit.

The museum had spacecraft as well—both manned and unmanned. An Apollo command module got a casual glance—I'd seen the one at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum on my many visits there. A Gemini capsule was more interesting; this was my first close-up look at one of these. The two-man Gemini was in many ways the US's first real manned spacecraft—not just an adapted nose cone like Mercury, but a vehicle with many of the systems that became standard in later spacecraft, such as fuel cells for long-duration power, extensive maneuvering capability, real windows for the pilots, hatches that you could open for spacewalks—a real astronaut's spaceship.

But even more interesting in many ways was the X-24, a lifting body that pioneered the concepts that went into the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station's (future) Crew Return Vehicle: specifically, the concept that a wingless or nearly wingless aircraft could be safely brought to an unpowered landing at high speed. This tiny, tubby rocket-propelled craft was dropped from a B-52 mothership and achieved top speeds of over a thousand miles an hour (respectably fast for the late Sixties) before gliding to a "dead-stick" landing on the desert lakebed at Edwards AFB.

All of this is easy enough to reel off, but just look at the damn thing! It has no wings! And yet test pilots like Milt Thompson and Bill Dana flew the X-24A to controlled landings again and again. How the hell could it stay up for even a second? The answer, of course, is "sheer speed"—even a brick can develop some aerodynamic lift if you get it moving fast enough. And indeed, lifting bodies like the X-24 do have fairly brick-like glide slopes and correspondingly high landing speeds—two or three times the touchdown speed of a normal aircraft. But they proved the concept could work, and the Space Shuttle reaped the benefits.

One of the most unusual exhibits dealt with Germany. A large section of the Berlin Wall—massive concrete slabs topped with a concrete tube to make it harder to climb over—was a sobering reminder of the Cold War so recently ended. Parked beneath it was a pathetic little Trabant 601S Delux [sic], the epitome of East German consumer goods. Shoddy beyond belief, its body panels were made not of sheet metal but of a compound called "Duraplast," made of compressed cotton waste saturated with phenolic resin.

These wretched little cars were all that an East German citizen could aspire to—and aspire was all that many could do. Assuming you could afford one, you got on a waiting list...and with luck, you might receive your car after several years! Needless to say, Trabant's manufacturer (the once-respectable Sachsenring) folded up rather abruptly after the Wall came down and East Germans could buy VWs and Opels.

Another exhibit in this hall dealt with the Holocaust. The one item that struck me most deeply was a crude map drawn by a US Medical Corpsman who was with the soldiers who liberated Dachau. In a crude scrawl it bears chilling labels like "Rail cars full dead bodies," "shower poisin gas chamber" and "filth TB lice of all kinds." I stood in front of that map for a long time, thinking about what this man had seen.

Wandering out of the galleries, I stopped in the museum gift shop and bought myself a few books: another one on Northrop's flying wings (this one in color and much better laid out than the amateurish "Planes of Fame" book I'd bought earlier in the trip); one on the Horten flying wings (shockingly advanced Nazi designs that were at least thirty years ahead of their time); a humorous reminiscence of one man's Air Force career; and a book written during WWII by two women, describing their experiences building bombers for Consolidated Vulture...uh, Vultee. (Yes, the same turkeys who built the B-36). Since I've long since finished Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and worked my way through the whole Lazy Daze manual, I thought a little light reading material would be good to have around.

And then, to my surprise, I found myself surfeited with airplanes by about 3:00 in the afternoon. Oh, there was a lot more detail to see, but I had looked at the things that really interested me. So rather than staying two days, as I had half expected to, I left after a little more than five hours. I had made a mental resolution that if I could possibly avoid it, I would not be returning to Enon Lake—even though I had prepaid for two nights—so I returned to Gertie and had a cup of ice-cold red grape juice while checking for campgrounds along my route eastward on I-70. I located a KOA (Kampgrounds Of America) about two hours east, which seemed like a reasonable distance—though at $30 a night the prices were on the high side, and on top of that KOA gouges you for every little thing. (Want to use your air conditioner? You'll have to pay extra.) But at this point I didn't care—I just wanted a place to stay that was east of Dayton.

So I headed out. Drove into an impressive lightning storm in Columbus (made me think of "Storm Chasers," and you can bet I was watching for tornadoes!) and was slowed down by traffic and construction. On impulse I tried the radio and stumbled onto an NPR affiliate station broadcasting "All Things Considered," their evening news program. Strange to think that it was the first news I'd heard in over two weeks! And strangely, not much has changed in that time. Perhaps I don't really need to listen to the news on a daily basis, the way I have been in the habit of doing. Maybe weekly would be good enough.

Eventually I got through the Columbus mess and emerged in central Ohio at Buckeye Lake KOA. Once I got set up, I made a light supper of potato salad (purchased at Kroger's a couple of days ago), sliced fresh tomatoes and avocados...tastefully arranged on a small plate, with tortilla chips on the side. Quick but tasty. Then I set to work making a few changes I'd planned for Gertie, moving supplies from the upper lounge cabinets to the now-vacant Rubbermaid storage drawers in the wardrobe for easier accessibility.

And I called my father Donald, my cousin Hugh and my aunt Deirdre to try to work out where to park when I get to Pittsburgh tomorrow. This is not trivial. Donald's little cul-de-sac, Ellsworth Terrace, is out of the question. It's hard enough to get a station wagon in and out of there, as I know from past experience. Hugh has a parking lot next door to him (formerly used by streetcars to turn around)...but he lives in a hilly old neighborhood with narrow streets, and I'm nervous about getting Gertie up there. Deirdre has a house in Mount Lebanon, a Pittsburgh suburb, and I had thought to park in her driveway for the two days I expect to be there...but I got the impression that she is busy, she and her son Jonathan need to get in and out of that driveway frequently...she was willing to accommodate me, but I sensed that it was a complication she could do without, especially given the short notice.

I arranged tentatively with her to stay there, but I'm supposed to call her back tomorrow morning. I'm thinking now about giving Hugh's place a try before I impose on Deirdre. But it's quite late (either 11:00 or 12:00 p.m.—I'm not sure) and I'll have to think some more about this tomorrow after I get up. I have to do a load of laundry before I leave anyway (another reason I chose a commercial campground again.)