An awesome museum

[rhu]

This morning, my father and I took the kids to The Cradle of Aviation Museum which is a few blocks from Roosevelt Field in Nassau County, NY. (introverte and my Mom were doing Pesach shopping at the time.) This is actually a quite reasonable location for such a museum: Roosevelt Field, before it became a shopping mall, was the airfield from which Charles Lindbergh took off for France, and the area has been home to many aircraft manufacturers over the years.

The kids didn't really have the patience to really appreciate the museum, which has some cool artifacts of powered and unpowered flight. The absolute coolest was a real Lunar Module that was scheduled to go up with Apollo 19. In general, the museum didn't have models or replicas, it had "near miss" artifacts (such as this LEM, or the actual simulator that the Apollo astronauts used, or a sister airplane of The Spirit of St. Louis).

We have to go back in a few years when the kids are old enough to appreciate it.

Comments

[42itous.livejournal.com]

Someday you should make a point of going to the new Air & Space Museum in DC (it's called the Udvar-Hazy center). It's this enormous hangar, and the first thing you see when you walk in is the SR71 Blackbird. And then to your right is the war planes, and to your left is the early-history-of-flight section, and beyond that is personal and commercial aircraft, and if you walked straight forward you'd get to the space section. I saw the Enterprise and the Enola Gay. And there was this cute 1950s commuter plane that someone used to use to get from home on Long Island to work in Manhattan.