Sunday, January 8th, 2006 - The Cavanagh Flight Museum at Addison Airport, Texas.

For our morning meals we found ourselves once more settling into a breakfast rotation of hot cereal, cold cereal, pancakes, and fried eggs--this being the morning for fried eggs. After breakfast we assembled at Beth's place and waited for Terry, Phyllis, and their dogs. Carson and I glued the final pieces onto his airplane, which turned out to be one of the most colorful biplanes I have ever seen.

The Cavanagh Flight Museum was at Addison airport just down the road from Beth's place, so Beth, Monika, Phyllis, Terry, Carson, and I drove there for a visit. The museum consisted of four hangars full of antique airplanes plus several more examples sitting on the apron outside. I particularly enjoyed the WWI and WWII aircraft exhibits as those aircraft at least have a passing resemblance to the aircraft I have flown, and if I squint my eyes really hard I can just barely imagine myself flying one of them in a "Walter Mitty" fashion. Hangars 1 and 2 had mostly U.S. and Allied aircraft, including a Sopwith Camel from WWI and a beautifully preserved P-51 Mustang and Spitfire from WWII.

While we were there they opened up Hangar 2 and rolled out an AT-6 "Texan" military trainer, and we watched while they started up the old war bird and taxied to the runway to give a demonstration flight. Lucky guy! The girl at the reception desk told me that those flights cost $160 or so for just 1/2 an hour, so although it undoubtedly would have been fun, it was a little too rich for our blood.

We finished off the museum with Hangars 3 and 4, which contained some of the German aircraft used in WWII such as a Messerschmidt Me109 and a Heinkel 111 bomber, as well as a Russian MIG 15 such as those used in the Korean War. Some of the U.S. jet fighters from that period were also displayed outside with the advantage that we could walk right up to them and kind of crawl all around underneath them to see the details. I know Terry and I enjoyed the museum, I'm pretty sure Carson did, and even Beth said that it was more fun than she had expected, so all in all it was well worth the entrance fee.

That evening Beth fixed us all a nice dinner, after which we enjoyed a huge collection of home made deserts that Phyllis had brought with from Albuquerque. Some of it might have been left over from Christmas baking, but I was certainly surprised at the variety of things she had made. We basically had a really had a great meal and a nice family "talk-about" afterwards (we talk about anything!) until it was time for us once again to fold our tents and steal away to our trailer for the night.