Day 3 - Pensacola to New Orleans

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<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Third Day – June 29th



We survived the stale cigarette smoke and had a pretty good night’s sleep. If we had been given a non-smoking room as requested my impression of HOJO would have been a whole lot more positive. Let’s not forget, this was a <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cheap room. I think with taxes and fees added by Travelocity the total came to about $42.00 – you can’t get much cheaper than that. So, overall the room was a good value. The sheets were clean and the bed was comfy. Never mind that the carpet was stained, the air conditioner was God-awful noisy, and the shower curtain rod was pulled out of the wall, it was still a good value.

We then took advantage of our “Free Breakfast”, pretty much what you’d expect, hot coffee, cold cereal, and mini-Danish that had been taken out of the freezer a few hours before. Hey, it was fine; it filled our stomachs and got us started on what was to be a very long day.

From the HOJO we headed to the Pensacola Naval Air Museum. We added this to our itinerary at the suggestion of both Denise and het friend Andrew (who was quite emphatic that we didn’t miss it). They were right; it was definitely worth the unplanned trip, we thoroughly enjoyed it.

The Pensacola Naval Air station is home to the Blue Angels and they remind you of that at every opportunity. There are decommissioned planes showing off the Angels blue and yellow color scheme all over the base (and the town). There was so much to see, I can’t begin to write about it all. There were planes on display from all time periods. There were even WWII planes that had seen action in the war, and then sent to be used as trainers in air craft carrier landing training on Lake Michigan, just off the coast near Chicago. As you can imagine, a number of these practice landings didn’t go as planned and the planes and pilots ended up in the chilly lake. The pilots were rescued, the planes were not. Back in the late 1980’s a number of them were found and retrieved. After about five years of restoration – mostly by volunteers – they were put on display at the Naval Aviation Museum. It is rare to see combat veteran aircraft since most of these planes were sold as scrap after the war.



There was a large area of the museum dedicated to carrier operations. We went through a multi-media exhibit that was designed to show how chaotic, yet organized, the deck of an aircraft carrier can be. There was also an area dedicated to PBY’s, “Flying Boats”. These were some of the largest planes in the Navy’s inventory. Unfortunately, I just don’t have the time to describe all the different types of aircraft and their engines that are on display at the museum. You’ll just have to go see it yourself. By the way, be sure to bring your ID since this is a working Naval base and you have to get through the guarded gate to get on the base.

We also strolled around the Pensacola Lighthouse, but didn’t take the tour, so I don’t know too much about it.

Now, all we had to do was drive to NOLA, New Orleans, LA. Everything went smoothly until we got near Mobile, AL. The Interstate was four lanes wide and traffic was flowing efficiently, then S T O P P E D. There is a long, low bridge over marshland and we were barely moving over it. It turns out this is a normal occurrence. The low bridge goes into a tunnel, and, unlike in many big cities, there is only two lanes going in each direction. One two lane tunnel going west, one going east, what a nightmare! It took forever and put us an hour behind schedule. Jill called the proprietors of our B&B to tell us we were running late (we had a check-in appointment time).

To make a long story short (yeah, I know, too late for that), we made it through the tunnel and rolled into The Big Easy about 5:30 Saturday afternoon. We met with our hosts and got a lesson on how the “house works” (the rules of the house, and how to lock/unlock the front door, yes, there is a science to using the locks (plural) here.

But folks, our day wasn’t over yet . . .

TO BE CONTINUED

Thanks for reading,

Don and Jill

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Comments

[Jay again]

The Reading, Pa. air show of the south
Don and Jill, I would have liked to see all that aviation hardware from our glorious past. The tunnel jam sounds a bit scary, perhaps I have a touch of clostraphobia . The suspense of your " There's more" is killing me. Jay