Joe & Deb USA 2014: Day Thirty-one

Today was our last day in Seattle. We got up early and walked to the Avis place to get our car, as we were going to drive to the Portland area, specifically McMinnville where the Evergreen Air & Space museum is located , home of the famous Spruce Goose.

We collected the car from Avis, who’s attendant gave new meaning and definition to the word surly , and drove to the Belltown Inn to collect our stuff. The NavMan GPS successfully and simply negotiated our way out of Seattle and we got on the I-5 to Portland. On the motorway we saw several traffic cops either monitoring or ticketing people , and it’s worthy of note mainly because we haven’t often seen cops on the road this trip so to see 4 or 5 on one journey is unusual. It also explains why most people were sticking to the speed limit ( the usual allowed excess is about 8 mph above the posted limit according to various sources..i.e two people I spoke with!)

The drive to Portland was through some spectacular countryside , the trees still have much of their autumn colour and the surrounding countryside is beatiful. Sadly it was also raining heavily, so an intended detour to Mt St Helens was off the cards as we’d not have been able to see much through the rain.

So we decided to head straight to McMinnville and the Evergreen museum ( http://evergreenmuseum.org/the-museum/ ) . The drive took about 4 hours , and while most of the trip was OK, the part where we drove through the southern outer suburbs was a bit turgid as we were going through several sets of lights so was stop / start for a few miles.

McMinnville seems a very out of the way place to have a museum , but the driver was an F-15 pilot Michael King Smith who , after completing his training , was keen to build and establish such a place, so together with his father they began the process of acquiring aircraft and building the site. However in 1995, Michael Smith died in an auto accident and so the planning and building continued with his goal in mind, and it’s certainly a spectacular place.

Set in a huge open space, the facility consists of three large buildings, two hangars and a theatre, and additionally another large building has a full size 747 perched on top that’s been converted to a water slide. Nice ! The museuam is easily spotted from the road as there's also another full size 747 parked in front of the hangars.

The centrepiece of the museum is the Spruce Goose. This was built by Howard Hughes during WW2 initially as a large transport aircraft to try & avoid the U-Boat menace that was decimating allied shipping. However, the stipulation was that it could not use metal ( a strategic material) and so Birch wood was the primary material.

Hughes was a perfectionist and as a result of his continual interference, the aircraft never got completed until 1947 , and in a famous event , it briefly flew for 1 mile at 70 feet before being put into storage and eventual move to Oregon.

The museum purchased the aircraft in 1993 and was moved by a very careful process to McMinnville. This meant the aircraft had to be dis-assembled, the larger sections moved by barge up the coast then inland on the Columbia river, and then transported by truck to it’s final site. Once there, teams of volunteers restored the aircraft to it’s present condition, and what a superb job they have done.

The Museum has many good exhibits and a great range of civilian and military aircraft. The Spruce Goose towers over everything in it’s hangar and it’s hard to convey just how big this is ( while remembering it’s all made of wood!). The hall also contains a B-17 , DC-3 as well as several WW2 and WW1 fighters amongst other delights like a Gee Bee sportster. Some aircraft are originals while others are reproductions or replica’s but the standards are very high and the quality of the exhibits is superb. There are clusters of airliner seats dotted throughout so one can rest and take it all in.

The second hangar focuses on spaceflight but also has many aircraft exhibits , such as an F-15 , two MiG jet fighters and an SR-71 Blackbird & X-15 Research aircraft.

We spent a happy four hours here, and after exhausting myself (running around) and my camera battery , we departed just a few minutes before the museum closed.