Travel -- Love it!
At a very young age, I was exposed to travel. When I say travel, I mean every form of it. I can't really think of very many trips that I have been on in which we didn't experiment with travel. Growing up, we spent lots of time in the car. We lived several hours away from my grandparents, and all four lived to seniority, if that's a proper way to put it. So not only did we log many hours making those trips back and forth from their city, we explored the whole United States by car, mostly. To date, I believe I have hit 49 states, and the only reason it's not 50, is because no one can agree on which state we missed. We think it was Michigan or Wisconsin. But it could have been Minnesota. That was the area, anyway.
I was trying to think of a way that we have not traveled, and I can't think of one. Ships, boats, canoes, ferries, rafts, trains (steam and modern), elevated trains, subways, buses, trams, street cars, single engine planes, multi-engine planes, jets (small, medium and large), cars, trucks and buses. Is there anything left out?
This Embraer jet is for sale. Click on the picture for more details. I love trade-a-plane.
At this point in my life, flying is the most fun to me. It hasn't always been that way. There was a time that I could barely put one foot in front of the other to get on an airplane. I just didn't understand the concept of flying. Heavy metal tube - kind of floats in the air. Really doesn't make sense. I used to need it to make sense. Now, I don't care. I am not a pilot, but I am so interested in flying. We live near an airport, and I have been known -- oh, this is embarrassing -- to watch planes land, and if they come close enough, and I can read tail numbers with binoculars, you can go to the FAA website and see to whom the plane belongs. Hey, it's a small town. Sometimes you know them, and sometimes you don't. But I LOVE doing that. I love watching planes land in funky weather. And I love it when they take off right over my house. We have a helicopter plant near where we live, and they test the Bell Helicopter Tilt Rotor V-22 Osprey by flying to our local airport for touch and go practice. Here is one of those bad boys. They make quite a racket, and things in our house shake as the Osprey fly overhead.
One of the more exciting jets I have seen land at our airport, was an NTSB government jet that flew in to investigate a train wreck near here last year. My first clue that it was a big deal was that it had a U.S. seal on the side, and very large letters spelling, "United States of America." The N-number was something like N0001. I lost complete control. I called Mike and told him Air Force One had just landed, but it looked a little smaller than I would have guessed. Well, it was a good story. By the end of that week, we had so many planes coming and going, I couldn't keep up. There was a very large one, probably the largest I have ever seen here, but I couldn't identify the type. It was smaller than a 737, but a bigger passenger jet kind of like that.
That's an F-16.
Here's an F-14, with its wings fully swept. I don't think the U.S. uses these anymore.
And this one is an FA-18 Hornet. I believe this is what our Navy currently uses.
I do know my fighter jets. Top Gun is probably one of my favorite movies of all time. You can give me some stats for the F-14's, F-15's, F-16's, F-18's, and MiG's, like the 29 Fulcrum, and I can't learn enough. How cool would it be to land on an aircraft carrier? Second thought, I would prefer to take off from an aircraft carrier. Let's head for land.
I probably shouldn't call ours a little airport. My understanding is that we have one of the longer runways in the area, and it can accommodate aircraft that are quite large. Still, there isn't enough air traffic to keep me entertained full-time, so I have to be lucky enough to catch them coming and going. My luck improves when the radio in our office is tuned in to the airport's frequency. That gives me a little advance notice. I must be an airport dork.
