A Museum Full of Planes and Ren Faire for Redheads

On Friday we had an exam in this course I am taking, but after that my day was pretty open. So I decided to take the rest of the afternoon an go to the National Museum of the United States Air Force. This was pretty cool for me. When I was a kid my dad was stationed here at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the Air Force Museum is one of the big things I remember from that time.

I only took pictures of one plane, the SR-71A Blackbird. When I was young I chose this and the F-15 Eagle as my favorite airplanes (probably heavily influenced by some model kits and posters I had and my dad's influence). It was just such a cool aircraft, and it was the fastest and the highest-flying.

It also happened to be in the most dimly-lit hangar in the museum, so it was pretty difficult to get a decent picture of it, especially while also trying to get myself into the frame. There are so many cool aircraft in the Museum, and I don't even know if I saw them all. I really like the WWII and Vietnam-era aircraft, but each era has some pretty cool stuff. There were quite a few that I remembered from my visits as a kid, and also a lot of new stuff. One new thing was that they had an area set up with the Air Force One planes from different areas, and you could walk through them. The walk-throughs were pretty cramped because all of the seating/working areas were blocked off by Plexiglas, but you could see all the different stuff that was in there. Probably the most interesting one was the plane used by Presidents from Kennedy through Clinton, as it identified the places in the plane where Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in after the Kennedy assassination and where a wall was cut away so that Kennedy's coffin could be carried in the cabin rather than in the cargo hold. That all happened before I was born (my parents were just 2 years old when Kennedy was assassinated), but it's a pretty big moment in American history.

Here is the information plate for the SR-71A. The last sentence mentions that the aircraft was flown to the Museum in March 1990. I remember that day, as I was an elementary school student here in Dayton at the time, and we all went outside during the school day to watch the plane fly over on the way to the Museum. Later we went and saw it close up as a family. Or maybe not as a family. I don't remember if it was just me and my dad or if my mom and my sisters went, too. I was there, at least. I saved a couple of newspaper clippings from the event, but I don't know if I still have them.

I picked up one souvenir from the Museum. I got this catalog showing the aircraft on display at the Museum. It's got a couple pictures of each plane, as well as what appears to be the text from each plane's placard in the Museum. When my grandparents came out to visit us (probably in 1989), my grandpa got whichever edition of this catalog was current at that time. A couple of years ago my grandma gave it to me, along with a couple of postcards I sent to him after their visit.

Today I planned to go back over to the park on the river and catch Pokemon. When I got there (after some re-routing due to construction), I found that the Dayton Celtic Festival was going on. That's not really my thing, but it was a good opportunity to people-watch. There were plenty of food vendors, lots of bagpipes playing, some other music, a million beer tents, some sellers of other stuff, and a lot of people milling about. There were plenty of people wearing kilts, lots of folks wearing green, and many folks who seemed to be using the Festival as an excuse to break out their Ren Faire costumery. I also saw a handful of folks wearing furry tails, so that scene was represented, too. I guess I can't knock them too much for having fun in their own ways. I collect cardboard with pictures of dudes in uniforms printed on it, after all. There were also a lot of people playing Pokemon Go. I had some fish & chips that were all right and wandered around for a while.

I took a short detour to stop back by the Dayton Visual Arts Center and hit up the Art-o-mat again. This time I got art from Aaron Butcher (left) and Teresa Wise (right). I also went back through the gallery and took note of a couple of artists whose work I want to look up later.

I planned to visit the Dayton Art Institute museum, too, but I lingered too long at the Celtic Festival and ran out of time. Maybe I'll find some time for that next week. I've mentioned before that I'm not really an a wizard at art appreciation or knowledge, but I'm trying to get out there and broaden my horizons a little. In the evening I watched parts of UFC 201. It wasn't an amazing card, but it was okay. I was distracted quite a bit and didn't really get hooked in by any of the fights. There were some good moments, though.