The blizzard swept from the north and east. I wandered down to the lobby to get one of the larger cups they have for the house-blend coffee and looked out past the registration desk and saw the white stuff blowing sideways. We looked at Doppler radar, and the immensity of the front passing mostly to the north or us was impressive for this late in the Spring. As was the density of the side-ways blowing white stuff in front of the lobby.

In view of the challenges inherent in Rosie’s inability to wipe her own windshield, you can understand our concern. But the passing of the darkest portion of the cell seemed to coincide with check-out time, and the forecast that had been mentioned at check-in the evening before was accurate enough: one-to-three.

Spike was confident that the down-slope into Ohio would ease us out of the slush, and we gambled on Rosie starting (she did) and the stop at the Sheetz Gas Station, and then we were off on I-70 again.

Rosie operates to her own rhythm, surging between 59-63 MPH in top gear. Dropping below that causes her to drop into a lower gear and ominously higher RPMs on her straight six motor, and so we proceeded in stately procession out of West Virginia and into the Buckeye State.

I normally cruise at about 75-80 on the Interstate, so this was much more like being on a state route with the speed limit ten miles below that, traffic whooshing up and around our little convoy. Stately. Columbus, home of THE Ohio State University, rolled by, and eventually we found ourselves in Dayton, cradle of aviation, and home to the National Museum of the Air Force.

Rosie was a brick on the road yesterday, speed hovering between 59-63 MPH- but as we turned left to the Holiday Inn Express in Dayton she began to billow steam from the hood.

Fair enough, we were at the destination, after all, and a pop of the Pepto-Bismo hood revealed the probable cause of the deficiency: the discharge line had come apart from the top of the radiator, spewing drops of coolant onto the hot engine. The line popped back onto the steel nipple, and should be an easy fix with one of those little circular fasteners with the screw that worms the metal band into a nice, tight grasp.

Of course, you would need one of those, so that will be the first task of the morning, after breakfast, of course. And some replacement coolant and a half a quart of 10W40. That should get us the last 139 miles into Kokomo to turn Rosie over to the Auto Museum for her interim home where people can walk around here, even touch her pink flanks.

My brother is serene about the whole thing, and we decided to not worry about it, and take the couple hours of useful time on a Saturday afternoon and do something interesting. More than that, actually. Check something off the bucket list. Go to the National Museum of the United States Air Force.

This morning I am still marveling at the amount of treasure we spent on that project over the last century or so.

Despite the magnificence of the facility and the bounty of the artifacts, I have to confess I was a bit disappointed. It wasn’t that I was not amazed and jazzed and jumping up and down at some of the exhibits- trust me, I was. (“Spike! Look! A P-39 Airacobra! The Russians loved those to kill German tanks!”) It wasn’t the amount or quality of the artifacts, but in the space available to display it all.

Between the Air and Space Museum on the Mall in Washington, the Udvar-Hazy annex for the big planes out at Dulles, and things like the Pensacola Naval Aviation Museum, I have seen most of my favorites. The largest one on the bucket, though, was the P-36 Peacemaker. It is an almost reptilian-looking airplane as big as a football field, with jet engines on pylons and six great pusher-prop engines hanging from the wings. I have wanted to see one since I was a kid, and there are only two places in the world that you can actually see them in the flesh- or aluminum, as the case may be.

Dayton in one of them. And off we went.

Which brings me around to the National Air Force Museum. The B-36 Peacemaker is there, all right, and freaking amazing. It is just piled all around with interesting (and smaller) bits of aviation history, and the scale of the behemoth of flight is lost.

She (and Bockscar, the B-29 that torched Nagasaki) really need to be seen in their entirety, and with a thicket of their companions to get an idea of the scale of the enterprise that, for a time, contested successfully to rule the world. “Here is a B-29. There are normally 15-17 airplanes in a squadron, three squadrons to a wing, and perhaps ten wings to make up a thousand aircraft raid to strike devastation into the heart of the Riech, or the Home Islands of Japan.

For the airplanes that ended the Pacific War, I would think approaching fifteen silver B-29’s of the 509th Composite Wing would be something that causes the visitor to understand the scope and import of what they did, and the length of the runways they requires and the vastness of the deep they flew above on their way to changing the world.

As it was at Dayton, we waked around a corner, startled by the PBY Flying Boat in blue and haze paint that was out of place, and there she was: the Superfort that smashed Nagasaki: “BocksCar.”

Amazing. Oh, there were other wonders, and you can see the couple hundred pictures on what we old-timers call “The Face Book.”

But when we passed through into the Cold War hall of exhibits, there was the B-36 Peacemaker. It was difficult to understand the full scope of the beast, even standing in her bomb bays.

The other one still in existence is at Fort Worth, and is more to my liking, for display.

​You cannot even begin to get a sense of how BIG they were in the jumble of treasures. That little snarky comment aside, that is one of the greatest places I have even been- a jumbled temple of adoration for the sky.

Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com