Further down Panhandle Lane
Well, I must say the drive from Apalachicola continuing west is nowhere near as relaxed or pretty as the panhandle has been to this point.
After a semi solid nights sleep, the dozen or so giants who must have checked into room 214 of the Nacho stompily pried me from sleep with what could have only been a continuous three legged relay race across the hotel room. Rob was already up, so our departure from the motel was a sparkling 8am, a leftover moonpie in hand for a roadtrip style breakfast. The giants were still busy running back and forth when we left.
It is a cool and stormy day, the opposite of yesterday. Today, of course, the idea was to spend some time at the beach in Pensacola, and though I visited, and yes it was white sand, blue water, and completely pristinely empty, of course it was also chilly, windy and raining, so the visit was more of a 1 minute variety.
We went to see the airplanes instead. It turns out that the Pensacola Naval Air Station has a huge museum on it containing what seemed like a hundred remade and refurbished planes, many from wrecks, reworked slowly by the servicemen that worked on them in their prime, if possible. This base, unlike most others, is accessible by the public. They have every type of plane imaginable, WWI, WWII, modern fighters, as well as things resembling the kitty hawk. If you have any interest at all in aviation history or old aircraft, this is a really amazing place. You can TOUCH these aircraft! And as they are the real thing, you get a huge sense of how it was like to fly these things, and the relative size. The blue angels stunt pilots, for instance, are in very tiny aircraft..where as some of those biplane kitty hawk looking things are enormous!
They also have full sized flight simulators which allow you to try your hand a landing a plane on an aircraft carrier platform. Finally, they have a bar there, that’s hard to describe, like a flight club, lounge with all the memorabilia to boot.
We also visited two relatively pristine forts on base, predating the civil war. They are very close in design to Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, only they didn’t get the crap beat out of them, so these you can walk through, and I could only imagine how fun this would be if I was 9 years old with a nerf bb gun. These forts must have been scary things to come upon, and were cleverly designed to make it near impossible to take one of them in short order during its time. Half fort, half bunker. Like I said, with some nerf guns and a few people, it would make one hell of a fun time playing ‘army’. Even now!
Places Visited:
National Naval Aviation Museum
1750 Radford Blvd., Suite C
Naval Air Station Pensacola, FL 32508
Phone: (850) 452-3604 or (850) 452-3606
http://www.navalaviationmuseum.org
Tags: Deep South, Deep South USA, Florida, Panhandle, Pensacola, Road trip, USA, Tag Index
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