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In late May of 1998, I went on a 3-day jaunt to Arizona (Phoenix & Tucson) with my friend Aaron. Actually, he was already down there fulfilling some family obligation and I just joined him for 3 days at the end. Being the hyper-nerds that we are, the whole point of my flying down was so that we could visit the Aircraft Recovery Center (ARC) at Davis-Monthan AFB, the Pima Air & Space Museum, and Pima's Titan Missile Museum at Green Valley. We also had time to visit Colossal Cave and the Champlin Fighter Aircraft Museum. (Champlin, as it happens, was probably the high point of the trip for a totally unexpected reason.)
About half of the pictures were taken with what was a really nice digital camera at the time (1 megapixel), while the others were taken with a truly cheap 35mm. Unfortunately, most of the cool photo ops showed up after the digital's memory was full.
On the pages referenced below, I've placed thumbnails of some of the pictures we took, along with captions or commentary as appropriate. Trust me when I tell you that only an airplane nerd could find most of these pages interesting...
| Aircraft Recovery Center 13 images |
Most people think of ARC as the famous "Boneyard," but that really annoys the people who work there. In truth, it's an inaccurate description, as many of the planes that arrive there are eventually restored to active service. The planes arrive at the facility, have their engines and fluids removed, and then get sealed in a plastic-like substance. (A black layer next to the aircraft's skin and a white layer over that.) I seem to recall that it takes about 6 weeks to restore a "mummified" aircraft to flyability. | |
| Pima Air & Space Museum 51 images |
Pima is a massive, 125-acre museum, mostly outdoors. They've got all kinds of flying things here. Oddly enough, probably the best thing about Pima was the opportunity I had to re-create a picture of my Dad during his service in Vietnam. | |
| Arizona desert 19 images |
The desert... there sure is a lot of it in Arizona and I took an awful lot of pictures of it. I'm still a little surprised by how much I liked it. You may also see a ground squirrel here or there... | |
| Colossal Cave | This was the last thing we did in Tucson and was totally "spur of the moment" (to stretch the Western thing a bit). It turned out to be a whole lot of fun. (I was going to include some pictures I took, but they're so poor it's really a waste of time. Check out the Web site for some better pics.) | |
| Champlin Fighter Aircraft Museum 35 images |
We had something like 2 or 3 hours to kill before our flight, once we returned to Phoenix. Even more spontaneous than Colossal Cave, the highlight of the trip (for me) happened here. |
In July of 2002, Anna and I decided to take one last vacation before the birth of our daughter. I'd never been on a cruise before and neither one of us had been to Alaska (plus it sounded like a "grown-up" sort of vacation), so we booked ourselves on a 7-day trip up the Inside Passage, from Vancouver BC to Hubbard Glacier and back on Celebrity Cruises' GTS Infinity.
Unfortunately, what is normally a 2-hour trip from Seattle to Vancouver (we had allowed for 3) became a 5-hour trip-from-Hell, with over 3 hours of the trip spent moving the last 1.5 miles to the border... Apparently, a lot of people had decided to head north for the Fourth of July week-end and, in the end, we missed our boat by almost an hour.
Fortunately, Anna had been burning up the cellular airwaves talking to Celebrity's offices and, along with something like 7 other groups of people, we managed to get berths on GTS Summit with the intention of swapping back to our proper cabins on Infinity when the ships crossed paths in Skagway. Aside from Anna's work on the phone, this was made possible by the agent at Celebrity (who arranged for us to whisk through Customs and had a parking attendant stay late to take our car), Summit's captain/master (who held the ship some 45 minutes past her scheduled sailing time), and the ship's equivalent of a hotel head manager (who let us aboard in the first place, as well as making the arrangements for cabins, seats at the Captain's Dinner, etc.).
pictures coming soon (need to resize them for the Web)
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