A Story About Life and Living It

We spent Tuesday evening at Hueston Woods State Park in western Ohio and set off the next morning for Dayton. We wound our way through dozens of small farm towns:

Dayton has been on my personal list of places to visit for, I don't know, about 20 years. I never really grew out of my boyhood obsession with airplanes, so a desire to visit the hometown of the Wright brothers and site of the largest military aviation museum in the world has been on the to-do list for a long time. Lani says that this fact alone should make my father feel successful. (Clarification: the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum is the world's largest aviation museum, but houses many commercial and private planes. The National Museum of the United States Air Force is the largest dedicated solely to military aviation).


 The Wright Brothers Museum is built as an addition onto the print shop that the brothers owned before going into cycling and aviation:


Inside were recreations of their various flying machines as well as explanations of their process as they went about designing, building, and testing their models and eventually their full-scale planes. This is one of their more advanced gliders:


The Wright brothers believed that three elements were necessary for powered flight: lift, control, and propulsion. Prior to their work, to summarize the museum, mankind understood lift about halfway. The gliders built by European aviation pioneers could not be steered, so the Wrights started from scratch and developed their "wing-warping" system to control the flight of their gliders. Since there was no place to buy an airplane propeller, or even an engine light enough to mount on a plane, they set about designing and making their own. To improve the lift of their planes they built a wind tunnel and tested wing designs. Basically, they did about 80% of the work to develop heavier-than-air, powered flight on their own without any resources other than their own ingenuity. True genius in action.


Interesting fact: while Wilbur Wright died young at age 45, Orville lived until 1948. In 1947, Chuck Yeager became the first man to fly faster than the sound barrier, though this claim is disputed. Either way, Orville lived long enough to see the plane go from the sticks and cloth with a homemade propeller than he and his brother used to an impressive machine made of aluminum with a rocket engine flying almost 1000 mph. He saw the plane become the most important weapon of a world war as well as the primary means of commercial travel across the Atlantic Ocean. Pretty impressive stuff.

 Here Lani goes skydiving:


Next door to the museum is one of the five cycle shops owned by the Wrights. They only ran one at a time but kept moving as their business expanded and they needed more room:


After the Wright exhibits we went out to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to go to the National Museum of the United States Air Force. I could obviously go on for days (and I could live in that museum for a month and not get enough of it) so we'll just hit the highlights.

Here's a Sopwith Camel, one of the most important planes of World War I:


The autogyro, one of man's weirdest inventions:


Lani with one of the largest airplane tires ever:


This plane, nicknamed Bockscar, is THE B-29 used to drop the atomic bomb on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. It was pretty sobering standing there looking at it, but it is certainly an exceptional piece of history. It's quite mind-blowing to look at it and realize that it was flying over Japan over 70 years ago.


Okay, a few more cool planes. This is an F-22, the cool new kid on the USAF block:


A B-2 bomber - "The Flying Wing". This one is supposed to be one of the most difficult planes to fly. They had a video going and it sure looks neat in the air.


Finally, one of the most secret planes ever built, the F-117 Nighthawk. I was hyperventilating when I saw this one across the hangar. I only wish I was joking about that. Unfortunately, they were rearranging planes in the exhibit so we couldn't get any closer.


 After that little boy's dream come true we headed an hour north to Bellefontaine, Ohio, where we found Campbell Hill, the highest point in the state. It's in the middle of the small campus of the Ohio Hi-Point Career Center. We found the USGS marker:


There's a flag pole and some benches... and huge water storage tanks just behind the picture. It's a nice spot and we nabbed another highpoint.


On our way to Pennsylvania we passed the world's largest basket in Newark, Ohio. It's actually an office building that serves as the headquarters of the Longaberger Basket Company. It's a replica of one of the baskets they sell and measures 200 by 130 feet and stands 7 stories tall.

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I have fond memories of visits with Uncle John, Aunt Karen, and their kids in Indiana, but without them there and with our limited time constraints it was hard to find a lot of excitement in Indiana. The northern and southern parts of the state were unavailable due to time. As a result, most of our time in the state was spent backed up in traffic on I-70 in a construction zone, which was less than exciting.

We searched all over the internet for something fun to do in Indianapolis, but everything was either expensive or not fun. Mostly expensive. The skyline looked great from the car though.

In the end, we drove straight across the state to Hoosier Hill, the highpoint, located just a few miles from the Ohio border right next to a corn field:

Hoosier Hill earns the distinction of shortest hike on our trip, at roughly 10 feet from where we parked the car. The highpoint was nicely marked, with a cairn, picnic table, and logbook to sign:


 The marker proudly proclaims Indiana's highest point at 1,257 feet:


After our brief pass through Indiana we headed off to Ohio.

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The highest point in Illinois is up in the far northwest corner of the state, which would have been incredibly far out of the way for this trip, so we put that one off and contented ourselves with a few historic sites in southern Illinois, just across the river from St Louis.

First we went to Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, home to the largest man-made earthen structures in the US. Unlike the burial mounds that I saw growing up in West Virginia, many of these mounds either served a ceremonial purpose or acted as raised platforms on which the more influential leaders of the tribe built their homes and meetings places. The whole area is designated a UNESCO world heritage site - one of only 21 such sites in the US and about 900 in the world.

This is the largest mound, Monk's Mound. Those steps are a lot more intimidating up close than far away:


The steps are in the same location as the original steps from thousands of years ago, but are clearly not original. This largest mound held the chieftain's home and meeting house. From here he could look out over the 6 square mile town and its population of 15,000 (in 1250 AD - about the same size as London and Paris at that time). 


Fun fact: the Cahokia mounds were built by the Mississippian culture. The Cahokia tribe came later and had nothing to do with the mounds, but lived in the same area, so for some reason the mounds are named after them. Blame the first European settlers (French trappers) for that.


The museum is full of neat artifacts:


Complete with recreations of village life:


 After so much culture we decided to swing by some rather large Americana:


 Behold! The world's largest bottle of ketchup! The factory went out of business years ago, but the bottle stills stands as sentinel in Collinsville, IL. After that it was back to the road!

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(Explanation: Mumbai is another name for the city of Bombay, India, which is an inside joke with my sister, Bailey. Unfortunately, neither "Bailey" nor "Bombay" starts with "M" or this would have made a lot more sense.)

After waking up at the Parks Bluff campground in unincorporated Lesterville, MO, we headed off toward the highest point in Missouri, Taum Sauk Mountain, at a staggering 1,772 feet above sea level. The trail is paved and the slope is so slight that the "summit" looks flat. Good thing there's a huge boulder for some relief:


No USGS marker, but there is a nice plaque:


After the highpoint we took the trail to Mina Sauk Falls. Actually, we just hiked to where the falls normally are but were disappointed to find no water there. Still a pretty sight though:



Neat panorama. Click to enlarge.


We had planned on meeting Bailey in St Louis in the early afternoon, but she wasn't available until later than originally expected, so to pass the time we followed some random signs from the interstate to the Missouri Mines State Historic Site. 


It turns out that 80% of the lead mined in the US comes from Missouri, which trades places with Australia every year for the title of world's largest lead producer. The museum is a run-down old mining facility built on top of 300 foot deep mines. 



Art, the museum director, knows just about everything there is to know about lead mining and happily showed us around:






Lead mining is actually much safer than you might think, so I'm sure OSHA would have been proud of their safety board:




















After this enlightening detour we headed off to meet my sister and get some Pi (pizza pie that is). According to Bailey, this is one of Obama's favorite restaurants. Two down, who knows how many to go on our Democratic Presidents' favorite restaurants tour.



We walked down to the river to go visit the arch:


To get you to the top they squish you into this tiny little car where you have to sit hunched over and play footsies with the other four people there. We were expressly forbidden from taking pictures of these cars, but that doesn't ever stop Lani:


The cramped ride was well worth it for the view from the top. The curving floor of the arch was kind of surreal and the viewing windows, given the triangular cross-section of the arch, are such that you can look down from either side and see the base of the arch touching the ground, giving you the sensation that you're falling, albeit slowly. Anyway, it's well worth the trip for the view of the Mississippi on one side and St Louis on the other. You can see very well despite the size of the windows:




At the base of the arch is the Museum of Westward Expansion, full of diary entries from the Lewis and Clark expedition as well as memorabilia from other famous western movements and settlers.


Quick! Do you best Thomas Jefferson impersonation!


Bailey and Lani took their fingers for a dive in the Mississippi River. Fortunately, both still have only five fingers. The bath in the stream at Hot Springs, AR must have protected Lani from whatever filth is floating down that river.


 Fortunately, Lani and Bailey were around to keep the arch from falling over:


The driver of this horse told us that he was trained to give kisses on demand. Bailey decided to test it out and got a face full of horse tongue. Unfortunately, the timing of the photograph didn't quite catch it.


The old courthouse was closed, but this is the famous site of the Dred Scott debates of American history that played an important role in the lead-up to the Civil War:


That evening Bailey came camping with us at Babler State Park. After we dropped her off in the morning and said our goodbyes we headed off to Illinois!

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