On Sunday my older brother, an individual who goes by the name of "Scott," treated 79% of Team Sabo to a day at Evergreen Air & Space Museum in metropolitan McMinnville. (Editor's note: I think we just set a record by inserting an editor's note after the first sentence. Author's reply: The point being? Editor's note, part II: What's with 79 %? Author's reply, part deux: Eleven out of 14 members of Team Sabo. Isn't that 79%?) So most of us made it, but those who didn't either had a prior engagement (Brenton), or were under the weather (Olivia), or for some reason felt compelled to stay home and care for a 1-year-old who probably shouldn't be left home alone (Julie, aka "Mama"). They missed out on a real good time. Despite the presence of Uncle Scott. (Just kidding! Uncle Scott is a great guy! And boy do I mean great! He even sprung for a bag of chocolate covered blueberries! Do you think I could write another sentence that ends in an exclamation mark? Sure!)
Inside the air portion of the museum we looked at a significant gun collection that conjured forth wonderful memories of hunting sagerats out east of Bend as a youth. Later we ventured into the bowels of the Spruce Goose, which in case you didn't know is a Very Large Airplane. Boy howdy is that thing big. You can shoot hoops inside the wings. Yes, you read that correctly: There's up to 11 feet of clearance inside those wings, meaning basketball would be an excellent form of entertainment on a flight...except of course it's one voyage lasted all of a minute. I guess it would be a short game. Hey, there's an idea for the Guinness Book of World Records...the shortest basketball game in history in the biggest airplane! Dude, am I on fire or what? And the plane is waaaayyyyyy long. You could literally be in the front of it in Rhode Island and the poor saps in the back of it would still be in New York, with Connecticut in between! (Editor's note: Remember our conversation about `writing fiction' a while back? Author's reply: Just trying to keep things interesting here babe. And give our loyal readers a geography lesson. A two-for-one!)
The highlight for me was seeing all the World War II fighters and bombers in the museum. When I was a lad I used to make models of World War II airplanes and hang them from the ceiling of my bedroom. I had a P-51 Mustang, a P-38 Lightning, an F-4 Corsair, a B-17 Flying Fortress, a B-26 Liberator ... all sorts of winged weapons o' destruction. I even had a German Stuka dive bomber and an ME-109. Then one summer in college in a fit of boredom, and knowing the planes weren't going with me when I moved out, I took them out in the back yard and hung them from a juniper tree and blew them to smithereens with my trusty Daisy BB gun. It was a bona fide, certified blast. And the local population of starlings appreciated the fact that I wasn't pumping them full of copper BB slugs for a change. But seeing all those planes in the museum that were for reals and not just models brought back sweet remembories of building model airplanes. Good times. Real good times. I suspect I'll start up again and recruit some young Sabos to take up a new hobby.
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