2009 Father-Son Road Trip: Day Two

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Day Two started with the Evergreen Air Museum in McMinnville, Oregon. While we’re blessed with proximity to Boeing’s Museum of Flight in Seattle this museum, literally centered on the Hughes Flying Boat aka “The Spruce Goose” is amazing in its own right. Chris & I ended up spending the entire morning there.

Our highlight was a personal tour of a well-restored B-17 by a former pilot and WW2 veteran named Barney.

He starts the tour by showing us the exterior of the plane, remarking about and explaining features such as the guns and gun turrets.

Barney clearly is quite aged, and kept saying how they’ve had to modify the plane for old folks like himself, adding steps to enter for example. He said that in his day they didn’t need steps to climb into the plane because they weren’t “wimps”… so Christopher walked up to the entry and vaults himself up into the B-17’s belly which gave Barney a huge grin. I think that small maneuver prompted Barney to give us the “extended” tour, as once in the plane we spent far more than our alloted 8 minutes. Barney took us from the tail gunner’s area up to the radio room, explaining each major feature and telling us how some things worked, and some things didn’t. We heartily thanked Barney for his service and his tour at the end. Wonderful experience.

Speaking of the B-17, I found a painting which was really a very small part of the overall museum, but it had a very touching story to it… hopefully you can read this:

I read somewhere that you can not photograph the entire Spruce Goose due to its size and the confining space of the Museum built around it, but with my wide-angle I was able to get it from the tail side wingtip to wingtip:

We left the museum and motored south on 99W towards Eugene. Along the way we saw this early 50s VW:

In Eugene I met a fellow writer on The Truth About Cars Paul Neidermeyer. We enjoyed a wonderful lunch out on his deck.

From there we went south, and then west towards the coast on a freshly paved state highway that was free of traffic and had long stretches under shading trees.

We reached the Pacific Ocean at Reedsport and turned south, stopping at a Fred Meyer in Coos Bay for some breakfast food, and some shorts for Chris.

Cool Car Sighting of the day: An Alfa Romeo Montreal (red) going northbound on US 101 at milepost 225. No photo of it, sorry, but I did say to Chris: “Hey look, and Alfa Montreal! You don’t see too many of those around.” Then I said: “I bet the guys in the Alfa just said ‘Hey look, and E-type Jag! You don’t see too many of those around.'” 😉

A ways down the coast we found a campsite at a state park, went into the town of Bandon for dinner at a Mexican place (Chris did all the ordering en Español), called home after dinner, and then we bedded down for the night just as the sun went down.