Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum, part 1. The Spruce Goose and mostly civilian planes.

What do you do on one of the hottest days on your trip? Go to a museum, maybe?

I guess this has something to do with planes...

For me, that essentially stops functioning above 25⁰C (Viking blood, you know...), that sounded like a good idea when temperatures started to go up above 35⁰C. Not so good it turned out, as a lot of the exhibits were outside and the AC in the Aviation hangar was a bit… tired.. that day.

If I had been there alone I might have persevered and been fried outside (and probably would have been in the museums far longer) but my companion’s health and sanity had to be acknowledged.

Anyway, Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in Oregon composes two huuuuge hangars filled with planes and space vehicles, booth the real stuff and replicas. Add to that a lot of planes outside and it is more than enough for a day-trip.

Let’s start were we started, on the way to the Aviation hangar.

Tha Aviation hangar

Todays first plane, an C-47A Skytrain. This one saw action on D-day.

You enter and can't really miss the big attraction - the famous Huges H-4 Hercules, also known as the Spruce Goose, made by Howard Huges and a bit of a flop, as it only flew once, in 1947. Read more on this fascinating plane on Wikipedia.

Well, it is big, no huge! The wing float dwarfs a plane under it.

Even large planes seem puny under the wings. Not to mention yourself...

Let’s check out this plane some more. It is fascinating after all.

Yep, you can enter it, and you should!

Okey, this is a huge plane.

The idea was to transport troops and equipment. Lots of them at the same time.

A beachball? Yea, the lower hull and wing floats were filled with them and they worked as insurance if the plane were to spring a leak.

You could get a guided tour inside the plane... if you had a thick wad of money. We skipped that.

Just a few pics, but I guess that plane alone was worth the trip as it will live on in my memory a long time. 

But there is more, much more. I let the pictures speak for themselves as I’ll show some of the other planes. I concentrated on military stuff, as my main interest is there, but there will be some civilian planes also and let’s start with the relatively few I took pics of. Also some other vehicles. They are in no particular order, just the order by which we walked.

A replica of the very first plane. Rather flimsy thing.

Another replica of a famous plane.

This turned out to be longer than expected, even though I took pics of just a very small portion of the civilian planes. 

Next instalment will be about the military planes in this hangar. Stay tuned for more. Much more!