Day 55 – May 28
Jane and Ike served blueberry pancakes in the BRT as a farewell meal. They are heading north to make their ferry connections to BC, Alaska and the Yukon and have promised to flash up their blog site again ( I sort of steam rolled over it on day 4 sucking up all the good material for the communal site). I will include the link as soon as I get it so you will then have two blogs to follow. How much fun will that be…..
After some prolonged hugs and best wishes the LRT flapped its wings and left the armadillo. As they rolled away I was sure I could hear sobbing or was it an attempt to muffle a yahoo. After travelling closely together for 55 days you get to know someone very well, you get a better understanding of their strengths and weaknesses as they do of yours. The success of the relationship then relies on your ability and desire to work within those constraints. Depending on how you manage that multi partnered dance one or two things will happen, you either never want to see them again or you have have added further cement to a life long friendship. There is no question that not only has our friendship survived this very close encounter of the RT kind but it has grown deeper and stronger. Possibly the best souvenir of the trip. Diane and I hope to cross trails with them again as we travel through Alaska and Yukon in their wake.
Au Revoir to the LRT
Our plan for the day was to do a bit of backtracking with Sean and Carla and visit the Evergreen Aeronautical Museum which we had passed on the way to Lincoln City the previous afternoon. Weather forecasts were promising showers for the day so it will be a good day for a museum visit. The backtrack trip bore no resemblance to the post Memorial Day traffic congestion we had seen the previous afternoon and we made good time.
The museum is notably marked by several large attractive buildings and an associated water theme park that has a full sized 747 poised for take off from the roof of the pool. The exits doors of the plane are the entries to twisting enclosed exterior slides that dump swimmers into the pool below.
Lift off
The museum consists of two very large hanger like buildings and a theatre. One of the hanger buildings is dedicated to traditional flight and the other is dedicated to space flight. We were intending to spend a couple of hours here and then head out back to the coast for the night.
What we weren’t prepared for was a world class museum that had as its centre piece the Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes’ outlandish water plane. This plane has a wing span of 320 feet, more than 100 feet wider than a modern 747. Contrary to what its name suggests, the Spruce Goose was made primarily from birch, during a period of wartime shortages of the more traditional plane material, aluminum. Having only ever flown once, it still holds the record for the largest wing span of any plane ever built as well as still being the largest water plane ever built.
On one hand it is a bit of an embarrassment to walk into a museum and not know that it houses one of the most famous planes in the world but on the other hand it was so cool to unexpectedly bump into this almost mythical plane. The other displays included models of Leonardo Da Vinci’s flying machine, the Wright Brothers plane, numerous experimental planes and helicopters, all of which were in beautiful condition and well interpreted.
The Spruce Goose
By the time we finished the first building it was 2:00 and we hadn’t had lunch yet. We moved to the space building and had lunch in the cafeteria before working through the space section which housed German V2 rockets, Saturn and Atlas rockets from the early American space program, Russian satellites, a stealth plane, a Gemini and Mercury capsule, some of which were replicas, some of which had actually been into space and back. There was an iron and nickel meteorite that you could pick up and a LEM landing simulator, all very cool.
The Mercury Module
We left the museum at about 4:30 but could have stayed for hours more. This required a bit of a game plan change for the day as we originally had planned to drive to Astoria, further north up the coast. All plans are STC (subject to change) so we had a quick scrum in the parking lot and headed for ‘Stub’ Stewart State Park, just south of Veronia, Oregon – one of those places that you never expected to visit. It turned out to be just about empty, so finding two large adjacent sites was not a problem.
We soon had a campfire going and even though it was chilly we ate a supper of soup (courtesy Carla) and fresh made biscuits (courtesy of Diane). In anticipation of nighttime showers we packed up our campfire gear and moved into the BRT for Port and a couple of games of Skip Bo before retiring for the night.