We definitely took the long, scenic route to Louisiana today. Because we had originally planned to spend last night in Fort Walton Beach, we had a few activities in that area that we were hoping to see and do. Ideally we would have just jumped right on Hwy 10 from Tallahassee, but instead we ended up taking 331 South and driving along Hwy 98, which goes along the water of the Gulf of Mexico. For lunch we decided to try a burger from Whataburger, a place I had never heard of but would see repeatedly for the next several days.
We hit Fort Walton Beach in the mid-afternoon and were quickly running out of time to see one of our planned attractions, the Air Force Armament Museum at Elgin Air Force Base. My map to the base wasn't cooperating and we almost gave up on going all together, but then we suddenly found it, about 20 minutes before it closed for the day. I took a bunch of pictures of the inside of the museum, which was amazing! I wish we could have had some more time to look around in there.
bombs and missiles all around the base of the plane
a real ejection seat - so cool!
GBU-24 Low-Level laser guided bomb
seismic intrusion detectors and a COMMIKE
F-105 Thunderchief
P-47 Thunderbolt
Browning M1918 Automatic Rifle training aid - that thing was HUGE!
GBU-28 Missile (the brown one closest to me) was called the "Bunker-Buster", and this one had names and signatures all over it. The High Explosive Research and Development facility here in Eglin were the ones who loaded the explosives into the casings of these missiles
P-51 Mustang
F-80 Shooting Star
40mm L60 Bofors Cannon (also huge!)
ammunition for the cannon above and others in the room
there was an amazing collection of rifles and other weapons in the Weapons Display Vault. He locked that room up extensively when the museum closed.
M-61 Vulcan 20mm Automatic Gun
rocket launchers
C & K took a spin in the flight trainers
helmets have changed a lot over the years!
They lovingly ushered us right out the door at 4:30 on the dot, but luckily for us that was just the beginning. On the property outside the museum, they had a massive collection of full-size planes and helicopters to see. They had plaques with information about all of these planes and it was cool to see their different abilities and designs based on their planned usage. But by far the most awesome thing about these planes was that they still bore their original names and painted pictures on the side and many even had the names of their original pilots written next to the windows where they sat.
SR-71 Blackbird. Capable of 2,510mph which means it could cross the entire US - coast to coast - in about an hour, but I noticed on the sign that it can only go 2,500 miles without refueling which means it can only fly for an hour at a time before landing to refuel.
MH-53M Pave Low IV
B-52 Stratofortress
MIG-21 Fishbed
O-2 Skymaster
F-4 Phantom II
BOMARC launch platform
Tomahawk missile
RF-4 Phantom II
AC-47 Spooky
F-111 Aardvark
F-15 Eagle
F-16 Fighting Falcon and A-10 Thunderbolt II
AC-130 Spectre
B-57 Canberra
B-17 Flying Fortress
B-25 Mitchell
After leaving the museum, we headed to our second destination of the day: the beach at Okaloosa Island. The girls are not fans of the sand here. It's the stereotypical beautiful white-sand beaches, but they don't like it at all. The sand is actually crushed seashells so it has a gritty texture and is such a fine powder that it blows all over and coats your entire body in gritty powder. In some places it feels a little bit like Moon Sand and it feels much different to walk on than the sand back home. It doesn't have nearly as much 'give' or sinking when you walk on it, but it sinks much more when you stand on and it and it gets wet. When a wave washes over it, it nearly turns into quicksand and I thought a few times that I might actually lose a flip-flop. The girls also found it frustrating that they couldn't dig in the sand quick enough to catch sand crabs, which is their favorite thing to do at the beach. But a beach is still a beach, and we made the best of it for a little while before hitting the road again.
their waves come so fast here that they are almost costant. no more than 2 seconds ever passes between waves, and sometimes less than 1 second.
twin digging
their gulls are much different than ours too. they are much smaller and have black wings, feet, and a black head. they look kinda cute and don't have the obnoxious demeanor ours have. they were happy to be fishing out in the water instead of scrounging around for trash
K's "seaweed castle with snow"
Instead of heading back north at this point, I took advantage of our last chance to drive along the beach and headed down to Hwy 399 that goes along Pensacola Beach. It was a pretty drive for a little while, but it's about 15 miles of beach with most of it labeled as protected bird nesting area, allowing you to drive a max of 15-20mph, so it took forever to get across that island.
prepared for chance flooding on this tiny little island
I knew it was beach, but most of the time it looked just like a desert out there
Little Free Library on Pensacola Beach. Not a bad location, right?
I can never pass up the chance to take a picture of the sunset.
We gained an hour back while driving tonight, so I decided to take advantage of that and drive an extra hour to our hotel. We had just enough time to make it back home by our deadline date, so I hoped that making up time here and there would allow us time to see a few things in the states to come. Very late at night we passed through Mobile, Alabama and took a little detour from 10 to catch a glimpse of the USS Alabama. The gates were all closed, so we just gazed from afar, and then after crossing the tiny southern tips of Alabama and Mississippi, we stopped for the night in Slidell, Louisiana, ready to see a few sights in the nearby New Orleans tomorrow.
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