Air Force Armament Museum

Tomahawk

We took advantage of a cold (for Northern Florida) and damp day to tour the Eglin Air Force Armament Museum.  The museum is located off-base and is open to the public.  The museum includes both indoor exhibits plus 29 static aircraft as part of an outdoor walking tour.  The museum building is well set up with a second floor mezzanine that uses wall displays to take you through the history of military aviation, from the early years to Vietnam. 

AGM-65 Maverick

The mezzanine also contains displays on the Medal of Honor, Modern weapons, the 33^rd and 53^rd Fighter Wings currently stationed at Eglin along with a display on guided weapons and laser / cluster weapons.  The main floor has 4 static aircraft plus Fat Man (the plutonium bomb used on Nagasaki).  The main floor also has numerous wall displays and two non-functioning, flight simulators that you can sit in. 

The Author as Pilot-in-Command

There is also a gun vault displaying military firearms used throughout history along with numerous aircraft mounted weapons.
The walking tour encompasses the entire grounds of the museum and has static displays of aircraft from every era since WWII and includes an MQM-105 Aquila – a drone from the ‘70s.  All of the static displays are painted to reflect an actual aircraft from the era presented.

B-57 Canberra

F-111 Aarvark

 
The Air Force Armament Museum at Eglin Air Force Base does not charge admission and is open daily from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. daily except for Sundays and Federal Holidays.  While outside yo uwill be entertained by the numerous 'fly-overs' of aircraft arriving or departing Eglin. 

Fly-over

 

 The museum grounds are also a frequent site for promotion, reenlistment and retirement ceremonies.  If you are there when one of these occurs please stay and observe.  These ceremonies are steeped in hundreds of years of military tradition and are an educational experience worth extending your visit for.

Ocean City Holiday Festival of Lights

Let’s take a trip back to Ocean City, Maryland.  The Thursday of the gale warning Lori and I had planned to attend the opening ceremony for Ocean City’s Winter Festival of Lights.  Because of the weather we opted to attend on Friday evening instead. Much to my surprise the opening ceremonies happened on Thursday evening so we missed an opportunity to see the community in action.  I will hand it to Ocean City – when they plan an event they pull it off.  The opening festivities happened as advertized and started exactly on time (so I’m told).  They did abbreviate the event because children were involved and there was constant rain, 35 mph winds and gusts over 50 mph.  The more I see and do in Ocean City, the more I like the place, mostly because they are not easily deterred.

12 Days of Christmas

 
As far as the Festival of Lights it runs through December 31^st as Northside Park becomes 59 acres of lighted displays, everything from the 12 days of Christmas to an animated Santa and his reindeer.  The cost for the Festival is $5 (discounts for seniors and children) and you get a trolley ride through one mile of fascination with over one million lights.  Hundreds of the light displays are animated.  At the end of the ride you are let off in a heated tent where you can get cocoa (recommended) and homemade cookies (the choco-chip are great).  There are numerous Instagram Hotspots, various vendors and pictures with Santa – for you non-believers this guy has a beard and a deep voice and is exactly what this believer expected – apparently though  I was too big to be in the picture line.

Seeing My New Address

Hurlbutt Famcamp Overflow

We made the shift to Hurlbutt Famcamp and ended up, as expected, in the overflow area.  While this is supposed to be a holding area for people waiting to get into sites with utilities it is more like a storage yard.  It is a short dirt road with grass on both sides and the RVs are parked in all different directions.  These guys should buy some marking paint and designate parking areas – and make a rule that if your RV is not occupied for 7 days it will be considered abandoned and towed so others can get a good spot.
Once we got unpacked it was off to find MyRVMail, our Good Sams mail forwarding service so we can actually pick up our mail – and see what our home address looks like. 

MyRVMail

 I’ll tell you, it is a lot smaller place then I expected.  From the lobby of MyRVMail you get to see the operation in action and it is actually a well run operation with just over a half-dozen people.  The timing with this pickup was perfect because my retirement gift showed up and was a decent size box.  By picking it up I did not have to pay for the mail forwarding to ship it.  From the mail forwarding service we took a little sightseeing tour and ended up at Bob Sikes airport.  This place seemed like an aircraft dumping ground since the first thing you see are three jumbo jets and an Air Force C-130 in various stages of dismantlement. 

Could This be a 707 Air Force 1?

C-130

However, Sikes Airport is a collaborator with the military in performing aircraft modifications.

In My New Hometown

For Thanksgiving we hit the road for the short three-hour trip to Crestview, FL (our soon-to-be home town).  Our destination was Eglin Air Force Base. 

Eglin has two campgrounds (Famcamps in USAF parlance).  To make sure I could get to them with no difficulty I made sure I had the location of the gate that allows RV traffic set in my Rand McNaly GPS.

 
  The trip was completely uneventful, boring even.  I arrived at Eglin and was processed through the gate quickly.  I set my GPS to get me to one of the campgrounds and found it full.  Eglin does not accept reservations and has a six-month stay limit so the snow bird homesteaders have flocked in.  I set my sights on the second Famcamp to find that all the slots there were full and some of the tent sites had travel trailers in them.  One of the tent campers told me that they are units that the base is trying to sell off.  It gave the impression I could but the Flagstaff on a tent site but that would have not gone over well.
From Eglin we headed cross-town to Hurlbutt Field Famcamp. 

 This camp area is not physically located on base so there is a little less security associated with entry.  Again this was full except for one spot that seemed to be overflow storage for an adjacent site.  Considering Florida in the winter is prime real estate this should be completely unacceptable.   Hurlbutt has an overflow camping area but we decided to bypass that in search of something more amenable.

We looked at a couple of state parks, Henderson Beach looked nice but I did not want to pay beach price since this trip is mostly business – get our licenses and get the vehicles registered - and then head west.  We ended up going to Fred Gannon Rocky Bayou State Park and lucked out.  We managed to get one night then the park is booked full for the weekend.   The problem with a wing-it adventure is that sometimes you have to work a little bit to get things lined up.
Since it is Thanksgiving we decided to firm up our plans while having dinner at the Cracker Barrel in Crestview.  We arrived at the Cracker Barrel to find a pretty full lot and cars in the RV spots – even though there is plenty of car parking available.  The hostess let us know the wait would be 50 minutes so we decided we would look at other options.  As we were exiting the lot we noticed that two doors down the Waffle House was open so off we go.  While at the Waffle House we figured out that if we did not want to book weekend days we could get a five-day stay at the local state parks.  We decided that tomorrow we would head back to the Hurlbutt overflow area for the weekend and book Gannon for next week.  Dinner and the return trip to the trailer gave us some time to really think about it and we decided if we can do two days at Hurlbutt in overflow, than we can do a week.  After all we are fully equipped for the boondocking experience.

Down Day Tourist

The trip to Eufaula only took a couple of hours so we looked to Atlas Obscura to see what was close to us.  We found the drive through “Museum of Wonder”. 

Viewing the Art

This is a small are museum that is constructed of shipping containers with windows in them.  You stay in your car and peer in the windows as you drive by.  There are some very interesting exhibits on display and several in the yard where you turn around to exit (and view the containers on the other side. 

Since today was a down day from driving we decided to play tourist in the Eufaula area.  Lori’s plan was to take the down day and border jump into Georgia and see Providence Canyon but first we hit the visitor’s center / Chamber of Commerce.  Once again the local visitor’s center proved to be a good idea. 

 Across from the visitor’s center is a giant fish (bass) statue proclaiming Eufaula as the “Big Bass Capital of the World”.  The statue became clearer once we entered the visitor’s center.  There is a huge tribute wall to Tom Mann. 

 “Who?”, you ask (like I did).  Tom Mann was a fishing industry giant who did everything from conservation officer to lure and electronics designer – to manufacturer to tournament pro and television host.  Again this was an opportunity to purchase inexpensive postcards.

From the visitors center we headed across the border to Providence Canyon State Park in Lumpkin, GA. Is a testament to man’s influence on the environment.  Known as Georgia’s “Little Grand Canyon” the gullies, as deep as 150 feet, were caused simply by poor farming practices during the 1800’s.