Tuesday, May 10, 2011

A SPECIAL REPORT for Margie

We're back in Michigan and I need Margie's help.

Here Cathy and I are getting ready to enter the NEW Culvers in BELLEVILLE, Michigan.


and we wanted your advise, should we just get the Original Butter Burger or should we go for the one with Cheese.



Sorry I had to do it.

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Armstrong Air & Space Museum

A baby faced Korean War Fighter Pilot

Every year we stop here in Wapakoneta for at least 5 days before heading to Michigan for the summer and every year we say that we are going to visit the Armstrong Space Museum which is right across the road from us. Well this year we finally did it, both of us have visited the museum before but it's been at least 30 years so we were due.




The museum starts with the first experiments in rocketry and goes through to the Shuttle, with a heavy concentration on Armstrong of course. Neil was born and raised right here in Wapakoneta, his first flight was in a Ford Tri motor with his dad when they skipped Sunday school to take the flight because it was cheaper Sunday mornings. He did his flight training and received his pilots license from the local (now gone) airport.






The Mercury Seven Astronauts.



They have a large number of original items from the space program on display, too many to mention here. We spent about 2 hours here and pretty much covered everything including a ten minute video in the main room. During the video they showed them being retrieved from the capsule after the lunar landing, they had to put on special contamination suits before settling on the deck of the aircraft carrier. Once on deck they walked straight to a containment vehicle were they would live for the next 25 days to make sure they didn't bring anything back from the moon, the interesting part here for Rvers is that the containment vehicle was a modified Air Stream trailer, which was made only ten miles from here in New Jackson,Ohio.


Neil Armstrong's Space suit that he wore while walking on the moon during the Apollo 11 Mission.














A special style Pepsi-Cola for drinking in outer space.











My favorite display.  These models are built to scale, if you look at the bottom right you will see a small white line I drew next to the Mercury Redstone rocket that was used by the Mercury Astronauts, right behind it is the Saturn V rocket used to take Armstrong to the moon.

Just a little bit of a difference in size.



Anybody that has followed the Space Program, from Sputnik and Echo right up to the present time will find this museum a worth while stop.

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

It's a LOVE-HATE Thing

We love the State of Ohio but we hate Ohio State,         M GO BLUE...............

We spent 11 days in Lancaster Ohio and it rained for 10 of them, We wanted to get down to the Hocking Hills area and do some hiking but the weather never gave us the change, so we just laid around and kicked the little bit of head colds we picked up in Louisville and then moved to Wapakoneta.

This is always our final resting place before we get into Michigan for the summer, I guess instead of saying final resting place I should say our final place to rest. We're at Lake Village Resort which is a Coast to Coast park, the part we like is it's a good location and it has a huge indoor pool with two hot tubs and a sauna. Since it's rained everyday this comes in handy.

We drove over to Marion to meet some friends for a long lunch, on the way there, taking the back roads, we came across this marker. This is one of the things we love about Ohio, it seems that just about every little town has some sort of history connected with it.
















Just a little ways down the road we spotted a little cemetery which looked like it need to be explored, there were quite a few G.A.R. markers but then we spotted this set of lost stones. It seems like they lost their way one way or another and nobody could figure out where they belonged so they set them all in concert in a nice row.

Lost souls of  Henkle Cemetery


After lunch we took some more back roads and ended up in the City of Kenton, while driving past the St Mary's / Grove Cemeteries we spotted this maker on the side of the road.






















It only took us about ten minutes to find the grave site.


















There was another recipient of the MoH here but we couldn't find him.



Notice that the plaque is old enough that they still used the phrase Winner, since this isn't Charlie Sheen and WINNING,  they should change that to Recipient. 







This the first headstone that we can recall that was designed like this.

I'm going to assume that he was a Cannoneer.













Almost forgot, the other day when we were in Lima we stumbled across the original Kewpee's Hamburger Restaurant, right downtown.  This was the restaurant chain that Dave Thomas wanted to buy but when the owner refused to sell Dave started Wendy's.  Kewpee's is the home of the original Square Burger and they are gooooood.



You can't see it in the picture but cars are lined up down the street waiting to get to the drive thru window.

This is all the seating they have inside, step up to the counter order and pick up your meal then find a seat.  Notice the Kewpee doll in the corner of the restaurant.






Time for the HOT TUB!!!