"Could I have this dance for the rest of my life?" - Anne Murray

Monday, April 30, 2012

Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum

In the countryside near the small agricultural valley Oregon town of McMinnville, is a surprising museum, of the quality you'd expect in a major US city, like Washington D.C.  The Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum is housed in a campus of four large modern buildings: one aviation museum, one space museum, one IMAX theater and one water park topped off with the 747 from which four water slides descend! We took advantage of the two museums, and passed on the theater and the water park, but the slides were tempting.

The center feature of the aviation museum is the original Spruce Goose, the wooden mega amphibious plane created by the eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes.  Didn't know it was in Oregon? Neither did we until Rick discovered it, so we took a rainy day to visit.

The Spruce Goose is so big you can't get more than a quarter of it in your camera lens at a time. So here are the four quarters:









Another thing that was HUGE was the amount of historical and technical information about each plane, with which I have to admit I was not fascinated.  This is not the fault of the museum, which really does a bang up job presenting the material. So to stave off the boredom I decided to focus on one aspect of the planes, the one I thought had the most character.....




Their noses.

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