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.