Water, Water Everywhere

When last we spoke I was grooving on the Gulf Coast.

If there's anything that's a buzz kill for beach-induced bliss it's twelve hours of rain during which you're trying to drive four hundred miles.

At first the rain was pretty.  After all, the ocean is still the ocean and I started the day with this view from my motel window.

Highway 292, the scenic route out of Alabama takes you through Pensacola and I saw a sign for the National Naval Aviation Museum, which is located within Naval Air Station Pensacola.  Since touring aerospace museums seems to have become a theme for the Driveabout (see Alamogordo and Dayton), it seemed too good to pass up.

I arrived about 8:30 a.m., having left Orange Beach early (for me, lately) and the museum hadn't officially opened yet.  But they don't lock the doors and Pancho, a retired airman/docent, was very friendly and told me to feel free to look around.  It's quite a collection of aircraft and even spacecraft.

They have a propeller from the aircraft carrier Intrepid which is 15 feet tall and weighs 27,000 pounds.  That means that it is almost three times as tall as I am.  As a matter of pride, I will not compute the weight ratio.

Not all the planes are American.  The museum has the world's first operational jetfighter on display.  The German Me-262 (called the Schwalbe or Sparrow) first flew for the Luftwaffe in 1942 during WWII with a top speed of 540 mph, more than 100 mph faster than the P-51 Mustang which was the top U.S. fighter at the time.  The Me-262 first saw combat in 1944.  Here it is.

There's a Sopwith Camel, complete with a stuffed Snoopy pilot.

And here's an interesting fun fact:  the first Transatlantic flight occurred in 1919 and was a Naval aviator piloting an NC-4 Flying Boat.  While not nonstop, it travelled over 800 miles and arrived in Portugal on May 27.  Can you imagine living in Portugal then, looking up over the water one day, and seeing a plane coming toward you?  It must have been amazing.

They have a lot of space exhibits, including the command module for Skylab II.

I met a docent named Jim, a retired naval aviator who flew during the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis.  And while Pancho maintained that his museum was larger than the Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, I couldn't tell.  The museum itself, although quite large, seems smaller than the Air Force museum, but I didn't go on the flight line tour.  The two museums are pretty complimentary in the sense that their emphases are different.  The Naval Aviation Museum includes some interesting WWII period exhibits as well as exhibits about aircraft carriers and radio intelligence.  And while the Air Force museum is trying to raise money to build a new wing for Presidential aircraft, the Naval Aviation Museum has a couple on display.  The first, Marine One, is the most photographed aircraft on earth.  So I took a picture, too.

The VH-3A Sea King helicopter above was Marine One for Presidents Nixon and Ford.

And speaking of Presidential aircraft, they have the S-3 Viking, used on May 1, 2003, by George W. Bush who became the first sitting President to participate in a carrier arrested landing.  You may recall this occurred on board the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, and you'd probably recognize the aircraft if you noticed the "Mission Accomplished" banner behind it.  During this event, the Viking was called Navy One due to the President being a passenger.

When I left the museum the parking lot was nearly full.  It was a good day to hit a museum.  If you're ever in the area, you really should go - even if it's not raining.

Heavy drizzle continued to soften the seascape and as I drove through Gulf Islands National Seashore the drive was enjoyable.  The sand dunes are lovely and I eventually arrived in Destin, the Luckiest Fishing Village on the Coast - or at least, so says the sign.  They also have the best sand beaches around, according to all accounts and confirmed by their Visitors Bureau, but the rain prevented me from enjoying them.

You all know me well enough to know that I'm not going to pass up something called the Fishing Museum - particularly when I can't get to a beach.  Given the weather, I wasn't alone.  Jean and Kathy explained that Destin is the closest port to the 100 Fathom Curve, where the water is 600 feet deep.  This means that you can get to better fishing faster.

The museum has a lot of fish tales.  Seriously, it has a molded models of a large number of fish caught in the waters around Destin.  Included among these are the world record smooth hound shark and red snapper.  There are exhibits of old fishing equipment and information about the history of fishing in the area.  The museum also serves as a local history museum for Destin, which was founded in 1835 by Captain Leonard Destin who moved there to develop a fishing industry.  There were no roads or bridges for 100 years, and no electricity until a couple of years after the bridge was built.  They didn't have telephones until 1952. 

After a delicious lunch of grilled scallops on a salad and a cup of gumbo, I was ready to take on the main part of the trip - still more than three hundred miles to go.  Unfortunately, the rain was just getting its second wind, so to speak, and it dogged me all the way to Jacksonville.  Or I should say "dogged and catted" me.  I don't like driving at high speeds in heavy rain, particularly on roads with lots of semi trucks, so I took Highway 90, which has as its only advantage a lack of heavy traffic.  The drive should have taken four hours, more or less, and it took six and a half.  But I made it to Jacksonville without incident, although too tired to read the Bhagavad Gita placed in my room by the Hindu branch of the Gideon Society.

This morning I awoke bright and early and glad to see the rain had left.  In its place were some clouds but also temperatures in the high 70's!  So I headed to St. Augustine, America's Oldest City, to see what I could see and to find the beach.

The first historic site I came across was fascinating:  Fort Mose (pronounced Mozay), a couple of miles north of St. Augustine.  This was the first legally sanctioned community of free blacks in what is now the United States.  You really should read this short history.  The basic story is that the Spanish, who owned Florida in the 17th Century, decided that having more residents would be great for a couple of reasons.  First, they'd be able to convert more souls to Catholicism.  Second, they'd have more soldiers to defend the area from the English who had settled Georgia, the Carolinas, and points north.  So in 1693 the Spanish announced that any escaped slave would be welcomed in Florida.  They would be given, in 21st Century terminology, "a path to citizenship."  It was no small feat to escape from a plantation and find Florida (usually this was done by boat), but a number of slaves did so.  So many, in fact, that the Spanish governor of St. Augustine decided he needed to, in 20th Century terminology, "red line" and move the escaped slaves into a new community.  Fort Mose was born and was home to around seventy to ninety people.  There were battles with the English and the fort was rebuilt once.  In 1763, when the Treaty of Paris gave Florida to the British, it seemed prudent for the black residents (along with most of the other Spanish residents of Florida) to decamp to Cuba, and so they did.  It is still an open question whether any of these folks ever returned to the United States.

That was really interesting.  Their Visitor Center is extremely well done and educational for both children and adults.  If you're in the area, it will be the best two dollars you spend. 

After I left Fort Mose the sun was winning its battle with the clouds, and I decided that I wanted the beach more than I wanted more history.

The St. Augustine beach is very nice, and it's free.  It was fun to see surfers, and most luxurious to lay out in the sun.  A much better way to experience water than I had last night.

Now I'm sitting at the Goodyear Tire Store because it occurred to me last night that new tires would probably be a good idea.  Then I'm heading to Savannah, hoping to take a scenic route or two along the way.