Vacation 2012, part 5

 Monday morning bright and early we were up and packing up our things in the hotel.  The plan was to meet my sister later on in the day, so we hoped to go to one more museum before meeting up with her, the USS Midway.  The USS Midway is a retired Naval Aircraft Carrier that has been turned into a museum.  It was pretty cool!  We spent a lot of time touring around and looking at everything, several hours actually.  My battery on my camera died when we were on the very last part of the tour so I didn't get some of the pictures I wanted, but I did get quite a few good ones.

This was a very popular tourist attraction, even on a Monday we had to wait in line for a place to park (and pay $7!), and then had to wait in line to enter.  We debated back and forth about going to this museum because the cost PER person was $18, which seemed really steep to us but in the end we decided to go and it seemed like a good deal over all.

Mark is in the process of building a model of this plane, an F4U Corsair so he enjoyed seeing one in person.  It's amazing how big it is!

Here is a picture of one of the many "ladders" going from one deck to the next.  They were called ladders because they were too steep to really be called stairs.  They were quite interesting for me to manuever with my big pregnant belly and I had more than one person tell me to watch my step since my balance was a little off :-).

Here Mark is beside another airplane similar to the F4U.  This plane has its wings folded up.  It's amazing how much space there was on this deck (directly below the flight deck), you can see there is plenty of room for a LOT of airplanes!

And here is a picture of Mark in the Executive Officers Office.  You can see how low the ceiling was, Mark only had a few inches clearance above his head.  Although I had more room above my head, being a lot shorter, I was still slightly claustrophobic, especially in the smaller areas.  I could never work on an aircraft carrier, that's for sure!

Here is the laundry room with giant washers!  These suckers were huge!

And here is Mark next to the industrial mixer in the kitchen.  You could really make a lot of food with a mixer like that!

Here are the giant soup tureens in the kitchen.  I can't even begin to imagine how much food they would've had to prepare in the kitchen, or how hot and smelly it must have been.

Here is a typical sailors locker.  Not much space to keep everything a person needs!  They had to pack everything in a certain order or it wouldn't fit!

After the close quarters under the deck it was wonderful to come out on the flight deck!  It was HUGE!

Mark had fun having his picture taken in this airplane!

We had a great time touring this museum!