Warbird Nostalgia

Judy and I had just been to the Tillamook Air Museum and that had pretty much filled her quota of air museums for the foreseeable future, so when I discovered the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, just a few miles away from the campground, she said, "Have a nice time."  The big attraction at this museum is the infamous Spruce Goose, which had been transplanted from Long Beach, but that wasn't what rang my bell.  Having been born during WWII and brought up in the San Fernando Valley near the Van Nuys Airport, I have a big-time case of  nostalgia for the warbirds of that era.  I still remember watching them fly over our house in Sherman Oaks.  And I knew from the museum's website that they had some real beauties.  The picture below is a stock photo of the museum campus, which includes a waterpark.  Go figure.



 I'll start with the warbird that just might be my favorite.  The Corsair was the plane flown by Pappy Boyington, a real-life ace in the Pacific theatre, who was played by Robert Conrad.  I used to watch the "Blacksheep Squadron" TV series just to see all the cool gull-winged Corsairs -- which I'm sure was less than two minutes per episode, but I loved it anyway.

 

This next picture is a display featuring two of the Luftwaffe's best fighters, the FW-190 and the Me-262.  The FW-190, on the left, replaced the Me-109 and became the backbone of the German air force for most of the war.  The Me-262 was the first operational jet fighter.  It might have had a big impact on the air war in Europe, but it was too late.  Few Me-262s were produced; the Allies had bombed the German aircraft factories into piles of rubble.

Now we skip ahead a couple of decades to the MIG-21, a very advanced Russian fighter of the Cold War era.  The MIG-21 saw a lot of action during the Vietnam War.  This one looks particularly nasty, I thought.

 

To tell the truth, I'm not a huge fan of choppers, but I couldn't look at these without thinking of my late father-in-law, Chuck Buzzetti, who was The Helicopter Whisperer.  This one's for you, Chuck.  I really wish you could have been there with me to see their collection of helicopters, of which this is just one part. 

And now we're back to the WWII warbirds and another of my favorites, the P-38 Lightning.  They had a lot of firepower, they could climb like a monkey, and they just look really cool.

Who doesn't love John Wayne in "Flying Tigers"?  OK, let's be honest -- the P-40 wasn't a great airplane, but it could dive like a rock.  The Flying Tigers would climb high, wait for the Japanese bombers, then dive out of the sun, make one pass, and run like hell for home. 

This might have been my favorite display, matching two old enemies -- a British Spitfire (foreground) and a German Me-109.  The Spitfire was the plane that saved England during the Battle of Britain, and they faced off with Me-109s on a daily basis.  Both planes are beautifully preserved.

It just wouldn't be right to do a blog article on the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum and not show the main attraction.  Photos really don't do it justice.  Without being there and seeing it up close, it's hard to fathom the incredible size of the Spruce Goose.  The planes in the foreground give you a little idea of scale.  The wingspan of a B-17 is shorter than the width of the tail of this monster.  By the way, just to set the record straight, it was originally supposed to have been built out of aluminum, not wood.  It was during WWII and aluminum was scarce.  Tough luck, Howard.

The Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum was an amazing experience, and I would recommend it for anyone -- even if you're not a warbird nut like me.  The space stuff was cool too, and they have a 3-D theater, a store, and a restaurant.  Stop by the next time you're in the McMinnville neighborhood and you'll be glad you took the time.

Ferry Tales!

We packed up and headed for Port Townsend to take the ferry across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the Island of Whidbey and then on to the mainland for our journey to the Northern Cascades National Park in Washington.  Here we are on the ferry just starting our journey.  Notice the “death grips” we both have on the rails?

 

 
This is the ferry we took over to Whidbey Island after we disembarked.  We got off the ferry at Coupeville, hooked the Jeep up to the RV, and then headed out to our next adventure stop.

Whidbey Island is beautiful.  Sorry no pictures folks.  We were just passing through and it’s tough to pull over to the side of the road in an RV with a toad vehicle!  The island is varied in its landscape.  From the central portion, where we started, it is very pastoral – lots of farm land with slow rolling hills and picturesque barns.  The main city we passed through, Oak Harbor, is located more near the northern end of the island. Then where we left the island (at Deception Pass) it is more like a forest with pine trees and ferns.  We basically stayed on Highway 20 all the way through Whidbey to Newhalem campground in the Cascades. 

The North Cascades National Park was established October 2, 1968.  It encompasses 684,000 acres and includes two recreation areas—Ross Lake National Recreation Area and Lake Chelan National Recreation Area (in the southeastern part of the park).  The park complex preserves virgin forests, fragile subalpine meadows, and hundreds of glaciers.  This park actually has more glaciers than any other area in the United States except for Alaska!  The North Cascades region forms part of the Cascade Range, named for its innumerable waterfalls.  The range extends from British Columbia to northern California.

I love the national park signs (most of them anyway) and the one for the Cascades is no exception.

 
Our first day out, we drove east from our campground on Highway 20.  We stopped a few places on our journey.  The first stop was at “Gorge Overlook”.  Unfortunately, you couldn’t get a good shot of the Skagit River from there (which is what I was hoping to do).  The fall was so long I had to take it in two segments.  This is the upper fall.

This is the lower fall.  Notice how it is stepped?

 

 
The Skagit River—and the local lakes—both appear emerald in summer, evidence of the park’s many glaciers.  As they move, glaciers grind bedrock into a fine “flour.” Water carrying a high concentration of glacial flour reflects the green and blue part of the light spectrum.  There are three dams on the Skagit, Ross, Diablo, and Gorge.  It is the only large river system in Washington that contains healthy populations of all five native salmon species and two species of trout.  And, if that doesn’t entice you, the river also supports one of the largest wintering Bald Eagle populations in the continental U.S.  The eagles feed on Chum and Coho salmon that have returned to the Skagit and its tributaries to spawn.  The eagles arrive in late October or early November and stay into February. The highest number of eagles is usually seen in January. Eventually we found a place to pull off the highway to get a shot of this great river.

 

The next stop on our drive was at Colonial Lake, just off the roadside.  I was able to catch some of the mountain beauty of the Cascades, which you can see have very steep inclines.  There were a number of random waterfalls cascading down the rain-slick granite faces.

You can just get a glimpse of the same emerald look of Colonial Lake (below) as in the Skagit River. If you look carefully right below the smaller middle mountain you can see a while puffy image.  This is actually a fog or mist on the surface of the lake.  The other cool thing is the reflection of both the sky and the mountains on the lake surface.  The scenery was just so beautiful and pictures do not do it justice.

 

Here's a better view of the mist/fog on the lake.

 

 

 

Off we went for our next stop which was Diablo Lake.  Again, the emerald water is just so stunning.  Isn’t this an amazing lake?  Cool little islands in the middle, too.
  

  

 

I set the camera up on a handy-dandy rock (that looked like it was put there just for that purpose) and using the auto timer took our photo at the Diablo Lake Overlook.  Yes, I could have asked someone to take our picture, but with the perfect rock in the perfect place … well, it just seemed better to let the rock do it than someone else.

 

A really “funny” (ha!ha!) event happened in the parking area at this overlook.  There were about five or six more mature (i.e., senior) Harley riders just getting ready to take off after viewing the lake.  All of a sudden one of the Harley’s alarms goes off.  So I hear the guy say, “I can’t find my keys.”  Well, his alarm (which really disturbed the peaceful atmosphere) went off about four or five times as he (and his buddies) kept looking for his keys!  Finally, they found them (don’t know where) and took off.  But I just thought that was pretty hilarious watching this “old guy” discover he’s lost his keys, the constant blaring of his annoying alarm, and his buddies trying to help him out.  Totally a senior moment, don’t you think? I felt like I should have video-taped it for them.  Maybe they wouldn’t have seen the humor in it like I did, though.

We got back into the car and headed on over to Lake Ross.  Gary took a great picture of Lake Ross (which is the biggest of the lakes, but the hardest to get a good photo of).  It’s just another beautiful emerald-colored lake along Highway 20.

 

We kept driving east but when it started to rain we decided to make a quick turn-around and head back to camp.  All in all, a beautiful, scenic drive into the Cascade Range.  We experienced unbelievable mountain scenery which the camera couldn’t catch.  Wish you were here to see it for yourself!

Psalms 104:31-32 // Let the glory of the LORD endure forever; let the LORD be glad in His works; He looks at the earth, and it trembles; He touches the mountains, and they smoke. 

Home is Where you Park It!

I bought myself a t-shirt with that saying on it!  I couldn’t help myself … the devil made me do it (ha!ha!).

The Newhalem Campground in the North Cascades National Park is so beautiful I decided to devote one whole blog to it.  This will show you some of the flora and fauna within our campground and our RV as it sits inside this wooded wonderland.

Many of the sites can easily accommodate RV’s although there are limited amenities in this National Park campground.  No electricity, no water, no sewer, no cable, and there are too many trees for our Dish to work.  We are down to books and DVDs (if we turn on the generator) … gasp!  They do have nice, clean restrooms with flush toilets; however, no showers and no hot water!!  This is what you would call “roughing it” especially if you are tent camping and there are tenters here.

We are in Campsite #86.  It is a circular drive-through site, and we initially tried driving directly into it but it was a close call with the trees on one side (literally inches away from the side of the RV) so Gary decided we would be much better off to unhitch the Jeep and then back out and try entering the site in from the far end. That worked out just fine … whew!

Gary wanted to say “HI” to ya’ll …

 

Sherwood and Sadie are also enjoying the little bit of freedom they have at this sparsely populated campground. We let them roam around in our campsite where there’s this great tent area.  Here's Sherwood, master of his universe!  That grody thing in front of him is a bone he found in the campsite.  Leave it to Sherwood to find the unfindable!

Here's Sadie, daddy's little girl.  She adores Gary and thinks the sun rises and sets on him (in case you can't see that!).

 

Wild blueberries are all over the place.  Here’s what a wild blueberry bush looks like in case you’ve never seen one.  I hadn’t until we were at Netarts in Oregon.  Netarts also had wild blueberries along the creek by the campground.

This next series of photographs were taken as we walked through our campground loop.  As you can see, it’s the same lush, mossy-laden, forested woodland as on the River Walk Trail (I'll get to that one in a later blog).  I mean with 110" of rain a year what wouldn't look like this?

 

 

 

 

 

 
We even caught a little bit of the local wildlife.  This is the only wildlife we’ve seen in the Cascades so far!

So that’s the beautiful environment that we’re in for four days.  We’re “roughing it” but making out just fine.

One last note about our camping experience here in the Cascades – it’s our last day and it started raining at 3:00 a.m. this morning with rain projected to last until tomorrow morning.  Just another rainy day in the Cascades!  Needless to say, we are hunkered down and enjoying the time reading and blogging.

Isaiah 44:23 // Shout for joy, O heavens, for the LORD has done it! Shout joyfully, you lower parts of the earth; break forth into a shout of joy, you mountains, O forest, and every tree in it; for the LORD has redeemed Jacob and in Israel He shows forth His glory.

The lovely little town of Port Angeles

We took two days off from sight-seeing.  There's only so much running around you can do.  Besides that, you have to do all the mundane life things like laundry,  cleaning, banking, blog writing and more.  But this blog post is not boring (as far as I'm concerned anyway!).  It's all about the area we are staying in as we visited Olympic National Park.

Here's a little history about Port Angeles.  Port Angeles is a city in Clallam County. The population was 19,038 as of the 2010 census. The City's harbor was dubbed Puerto de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles (Port of Our Lady of the Angels) by Spanish explorer Francisco de Eliza in 1791, but by the mid-19th century the name had been shortened and partially anglicized to its current form, Port Angeles Harbor.

Port Angeles is located in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains, which means the city gets significantly less rain than other areas of western Washington. The average annual precipitation total is approximately 25 inches, compared to Seattle's 38 inches.  Port Angeles is also the birthplace of football hall of famer, John Elway.

 

Entering the "old" part of Port Angeles, you are greeted by this wonderful, warm "Welcome" display.

 

This next series of photos were taken in the "old" downtown area.  In this section of town, there are no box retailers, no fast food restaurants, no Starbucks nor any other franchised type of business.  All those types of business establishments are located in the outskirts of the older part of the city.  This helps to maintain a nice, homey small-town feel to the city. 

 

This is the Carnegie Museum which Gary said used to be the library.

 

Isn't this an amazing building?  It's the Clallam County Courthouse established in 1914 and restored in 1999 and again in 2010.

 

This is the Veteran's Memorial Park.

This is a scenic area with a beautiful water fountain right off 1st Street.  Can you see the stairs going up behind it? Don't you love those stunning hanging flower baskets?

  

We had another exceptional church experience this Sunday.  We visited Lighthouse Church in Port Angeles.  Want to read a little bit about this church?  Here's a link to their website:  http://www.lighthousepa.org/

 

This church sits on a hill that overlooks the port and the Strait of Juan de Fuca.  In this photo from the church property you can see across the port and the strait all the way to Canada.  See that thin slip of land right behind the ship on the left?  That is Ediz Hook--basically a spit.  Take a look at the beautiful blue skies because in a later shot you'll know why I brought this to your attention.

 

On our way out to Ediz Hook, we stopped at this view point that overlooks the port and I couldn't resist this typical beach portrait of a seagull standing on its poop stoup.

 

Another port portrait from the view point looking across the Straight of Juan de Fuca toward Canada.  See the few gathering clouds?

 

We drove out the whole length of the spit (about 3 miles long) after church and took a few photos from that vantage point, looking back from the spit toward the church on the hill and the city, Port Angeles.  Notice that the clouds have moved past the gathering stage and are now thickly hanging over the mountains?  This is what meteorologists refer to as a partly cloudy day!  It's true, though.  It didn't rain.

The next two photos were taken the night before from our campsite.  Almost every night the clouds come swirling down the mountains lingering over the mountaintops.  The first photo was taken looking north.  Doesn't it makes for such an enchanting picture?

 

This photo was taken a little later in the evening looking west as the sun was setting.

Monday we are heading to Port Townsend to load up on the ferry (RV, Jeep and two dogs) over to the mainland (Coupeville) and then off to the Northern Cascades National Park.  Rain is in the forecast for our whole time in the Cascades :(.  It should still be beautiful country to look at, but the rain may make for dreary photos.