Travel from Chattanooga to Waterloo Iowa

Travel from Chattanooga to Waterloo, Iowa 

After we visited Megan and Adrian, we traveled from Chattanooga to Waterloo, Iowa.  We are grouping this together because we did very little touring.  The majority of stops we made were to visit family.  We did manage to include some tourist attractions along the way, but family was the focus of this leg of the journey.

Corbin, Kentucky

 Colonel Sanders established his very first fried chicken establishment, which he called the Sander's Café, in Corbin, KY. Unfortunately, fire destroyed the building after two years. He rebuilt the restaurant across the street from the first location. The area was a main thoroughfare for many travelers along US-25. He had a vision. Realizing weary travelers would be hungry and in need of a place to rest, he added a motel next to his café. To promote his motel, he added a replica of one of the motel rooms inside his restaurant.  He felt he could entice the women travelers by showing them a replica of his welcoming rooms as they entered the dining room with their families. After the family spent the night in Colonel Sanders motel, they could buy gas at his gas station and then continue their travels. When I-75 opened, it bypassed that section of town and drastically impacted his business.  He sold the café in 1956 and began selling KFC franchises.

Now, the restaurant is still open for business and has been converted into a museum. You can stop for a meal and see some of the history of KFC, including the replica motel room inside the dining room. Colonel Sanders became an icon. His image and name remain symbols of the company still today.

Lisa was either posing with Colonel Sanders or trying to nab that bucket of chicken from him. 

I have to keep a close eye on her or I find her like this.

Wright Patterson Air Force Base Museum

The National Museum of the United States Air Force is the official museum of the United States Air Force located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The NMUSAF is the oldest and largest military aviation museum in the world, with more than 360 aircraft and missiles on display. The museum draws about a million visitors each year, making it one of the most frequently visited tourist attractions in Ohio.

The museum dates to 1923, when the Engineering Division at Dayton's McCook Field first collected technical artifacts for preservation

Through the 1960s, Eugene Kettering, son of Charles F. Kettering, led the project to build a permanent structure to house the collections and became the first chairman of the board of the Air Force Museum Foundation. When he died in 1969, his widow, Virginia, took over the project. Her "determination, logic and meticulous attention" kept it on track, and the current facility opened in 1971. Not including its annex on Wright Field proper, the museum has more than tripled in square footage since 1971, with the addition of a second hangar in 1988, a third in 2003, and a fourth in 2016.

The museum's collection contains many rare aircraft of historical or technological importance, and various memorabilia and artifacts from the history and development of aviation. Among them is the Apollo 15 Command Module Endeavour which orbited the Moon 74 times in 1971, one of four surviving Convair B-36 Peacemakers, the only surviving North American XB-70 Valkyrie and Bockscar—the Boeing B-29 Superfortress that dropped the Fat Man atomic bomb on Nagasaki during the last days of World War II.

In 2016, the museum opened its 224,000-square-foot fourth building, bringing its size to 1,120,000 square feet. The addition was privately financed by the Air Force Museum Foundation at a cost of $40.8 million. The building houses more than 70 aircraft, missiles, and space vehicles in four new galleries - Presidential, Research and Development, Space and Global Reach, along with three science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) Learning Nodes.

In 2018, the Boeing B-17F Memphis Belle was placed on permanent public display in the World War II Gallery. The aircraft and its crew became iconic symbols of the heavy bomber crews and support personnel who helped defeat Nazi Germany.

 Outside of the museum, there is a large courtyard with memorials to various WWII Army Air Corp divisions.  This one was to honor the Bomb Group that Mark's Uncle Walt (his mom's brother) flew with in WWII.

These were examples of some of the various window flags that adorned the houses of military families. The flags were hung with pride to show the family had someone serving in the military. The flags were to honor those who serve.

This one is a replica of the Wright brothers' first plane.

This was the actual marker for Lt. Quentin Roosevelt's grave.  Quentin Roosevelt was Theodore Roosevelt's youngest son.

America's first black military pilot was not a member of the US military. He served in the French Foreign Legion during WWII.

The Liberator was the plane flown by the 492nd Bomb group during WWII.

The Memphis Belle is a Boeing B-17F Flying Fortress used during WWII that inspired the making of two motion pictures: a 1944 documentary film, Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress and the 1990 Hollywood feature film, Memphis Belle. It was one of the first United States Army Air Forces B-17 heavy bombers to complete 25 combat missions, after which the aircrew returned with the bomber to the United States to sell war bonds.

This is one of the two planes that dropped nuclear bombs on Japan. Last year, we saw the Enola Gray, which dropped the Little Boy on Hiroshima, at the Smithsonian.  Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki by Bockscar,

She is minus her photo companion, Karma, today. She stands alongside of the F-111, Aardvark, Mark's brother, Dennis, worked on these during the Vietnam war.  

 

These pieces of the Berlin wall were brought to the museum after the fall of the Communist governments across eastern Europe.

 We are not very knowledgeable plane people, but for a plane to go into a spin, recover itself and land wheels up is an incredible feat. 

  The fastest military plane ever built was used during the Cold War.

The museum has several Presidential aircraft, including those used by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower. The centerpiece of the presidential aircraft collection is SAM 26000, a modified Boeing 707 known as a VC-137C, used regularly by presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon. This aircraft took the President and Mrs. Kennedy to Dallas on 22 November 1963—the day of the President's assassination. Vice President Johnson was sworn in as president aboard it shortly after the assassination, and the aircraft then carried Kennedy's body back to Washington. It became the backup presidential aircraft after Nixon's first term. It was temporarily removed from display on 5 December 2009, repainted and returned to display on President's Day in 2010.

All presidential aircraft are now displayed in the Presidential Gallery,

This one was Harry S. Truman's Presidential plane.

Smaller planes were used by Presidents from Lyndon Baines Johnson to William J. Clinton.  These planes had the capability to move the presidents quickly, without Pomp and Circumstance of Air Force one.

SAM 26000 was the first of two Boeing VC-137C the United States Air Force aircraft specifically configured and maintained for use by the president of the United States. It used the callsign Air Force One when the president was on board, otherwise  it was called SAM 26000, with SAM indicating Special Air Mission.

SAM 26000 was a customized Boeing 707. It entered service in 1962 during the administration of John F. Kennedy. It was later replaced for presidential service in 1972 but kept as a backup. The aircraft was finally retired in 1998

Apollo 15 (July 26 – August 7, 1971) was the ninth crewed mission in the United States' Apollo program and the fourth to land on the Moon. It  had a longer stay on the Moon and a greater focus on science than earlier landings. Apollo 15 saw the first use of the Lunar Roving Vehicle.

During the return trip, Worden performed the first spacewalk in deep space. The Apollo 15 mission splashed down safely on August 7 despite the loss of one of its three parachutes.

The mission accomplished its goals but was marred by negative publicity the following year when it emerged that the crew had carried unauthorized postal covers to the lunar surface, some of which were sold by a West German stamp dealer. The members of the crew were reprimanded for poor judgment, and they never flew in space again. The mission also saw the collection of the Genesis Rock, thought to be part of the Moon's early crust, and Scott's use of a hammer and a feather to validate Galileo's theory that when there is no air resistance, objects fall at the same rate due to gravity regardless of their mass.

Other than the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, we have not toured many aircraft museums.  This was by far the most impressive air museum we have visited.  If you have a major interest in aviation, you could easily spend several days immersed in this museum.