July 2 - Boise, Idaho - Warhawkmuseum

Carrie had to leave on a morning flight, so Patience took her to the airport while Monika did our accumulated laundry. Much of the day was driving around to car dealers to have the shocks replaced on Jake's Chevy S10 and the oil changed and tires rotated on our Tundra. But in between we squeezed in an airplane museum in a hangar at a small local airport that was quite interesting. Despite its small size, the museum had several interesting aircraft and quite a few static displays. Jake and I spent several minutes studying a cutaway model of an old jet engine in order to get a really firm grasp of how the air was flowing thru all the vanes and ducts and exactly how the power was extracted from the burning of the jet fuel.

The major displays in the museum were, of course, the antique aircraft, and they ranged from a beautiful blue Fokker Triplane to WW II fighters like the KittyHawk, the P40 Warhawk and a P51C Lightning. The Fokker was an accurate, flying reconstruction of the type of plane that Baron Von Richtofen used in WWI, but they had replaced the original rotary engine (entire engine plus propeller all rotate together) with a more modern but similarly sized radial engine (the engine cylinders stay fixed while the crankshaft and propeller rotate). Since the rotary engines were notoriously fragile and unreliable, the radial would be a much better bet for actually flying the aircraft. I had an airplane once where the engine was quite old and occasionally made strange noises. That really spooked me when I was flying over the mountains of West Virginia where I couldn't see an emergency landing field to save my soul, so I can really appreciate the advantage of having a reliable engine, especially when you can't just pull over and stop when the rubber band breaks!

The P40 Warhawk was used by the Flying Tigers in China before the US got into WWII and the one in that museum had the actual autographs from the pilots on the elevator! I had read about the exploits of the Flying Tigers and admired them for fighting the Japanese with absolutely minimal resources but a great deal of courage. Curiously, the episode that comes most readily to mind concerned a crash landing of one of the P40s in a Chinese river. The plane sank and although the pilot was not harmed, he thought it was a total loss. However, the Chinese raised the plane by blowing air into reeds and diving down and accumulating these under the wing of the airplane until it floated to the surface! Something about the indomitable will of the Chinese people as well as the courage of the volunteer American pilots was brought home to me by that incident.

Jake grilled some of the thickest hamburgers I had ever seen in the backyard for our evening meal. He wasn't totally sure they would be done in the center, but as it turned out they were cooked to perfection and we had a really nice dinner, after which Jake got the awning assembly on our trailer to function. Since that hadn't been unrolled from the time we purchased the trailer last September (see Wanderung 4), we let it dry out for a couple of hours before rolling it back up. Most of our campgrounds out west had no tree shade to speak of, so I was hoping that the awning would give us some much needed shade on one side of the trailer, at least. Jake also disassembled the exterior shower faucet, but we couldn't quite wriggle a washer or rubber valve into position, so it still leaked when we try to use it, but at least I had more of an idea where the problem was.

We talked about many things as dusk gradually deepened and the sky shifted slowly from a bright clear blue to purple and then to black. Patience and Jake liked the weather and the lifestyle in Boise so much that they planned to stay after Jake's 20 year military career was over. They described the winter weather as cold, but more in the 20s and 30s rather than the bitter below zero winters of the northern plains. Snow is plentiful on the the mountain slopes--there is a ski area just north of town--but where they live in the valley there is usually only an inch or two of snow and that melts off in a few weeks, in contrast to the 6 months of snow cover that I had heard people talk about on the northern plains. The summer is hot, but with the low humidity temps below 100 were easier to take than would be the case back east, at least for most folks. A young woman at the YMCA said that she preferred the humidity and heat of the Washington D.C. area, but I haven't heard many people express that opinion! The weather is one thing that I really cannot accurately determine while traveling thru all the different parts of the US, and it certainly does make a difference in the "livability" of a region, at least for those of us who spend a significant part of the time outdoors. All in all we had a pleasant, low-key discussion during the evening, and it cooled off so rapidly after sunset that we had a nice cool night's sleep despite the daytime temperatures in the 90s.