For those who remember the 1968 movie Yours, Mine and Ours, this blog isn’t about kids. We have one “kid” and she is ours. This blog is about three museums, one in Randy’s wheelhouse, one in mine, and one that had something for both of us.
Yours – Commemorative Air Force Museum
Randy really enjoys airplane museums and we have been to some great ones. (The blog post Airplane Stories visits one of the best.) My eyes glaze over after a couple hours but Randy could go on for days. In Mesa, we visited the Commemorative Air Force Museum.
The Commemorative Air Force is an international organization dedicated to preserving combat aviation history. They focus primarily on World War II aircraft and service.
The Arizona group’s first vintage aircraft restoration was a donated B-17 named Sentimental Journey. Although we have been inside a B-17 before, this time we had a docent walking us through every nook and cranny.
Gary is a retired air force optometrist and licensed pilot – and a great docent!
The saying “the full nine yards” came from nine yards of munitions used by the waist- gunners in B-17s.
It gets cold up there – like 40 below zero at 22,0000 feet. Each waist gunner station had an outlet for the gunner’s heated long underwear.
Commemorative Air Force pilots (most former military and airline), and crew fly their preserved aircraft to air shows around the country. As a fund raising tool, they sell rides on many of the vintage planes. Waist-gunner area seats are $425 per ride and $850 for the coveted bombardier nose seat.
We watched an interesting movie about B-17s. They weren’t the fastest or most agile, but they were nearly indestructible. They often returned to base with significant damage. Some credit the B-17 with winning World War II.
General George C. Marshall credited the jeep as America’s Greatest Contribution to Modern Warfare in 1941. WWII correspondent Ernie Pyle said the Jeep and the Coleman GI pocket stove were the “two most important noncombat pieces of equipment ever developed.”
We learned how the Army Air Corps trained pilots in the WWII era. Potential pilots completed a twelve week module on the first plane and if they passed, went on to the second, third and fourth planes in successive twelve week modules. Each plane type was more advanced. Those that failed in a module might become crew or a gunner.
This plane is a DC-3, also called a C-47 in military vernacular, a transport plane for troops and supplies. This particular plane was surplussed in 1951, purchased by a company in Bolivia, and used as a transport plane in South America.
The Hoover Vacuum company purchased this plane (1960s?) and outfitted it as their corporate plane. A ride on this vintage plane costs $150.
The third plane we were told about was the B-25, Maid in the Shade. Fund raising seat prices range from $325 – $650.
Sixteen B-25s were used in Colonel Doolittle’s bombing raid over Tokyo memorialized in the movie 30 Seconds Over Tokyo. This was the first retaliatory raid on Japan after Pearl Harbor. The attack on Tokyo was successful but most pilots ran out of fuel returning and had a variety of experiences in China and Japan. 
The Commemorative Air Force invites people who had experience with a plane model to sign it. Notice Ed Saylor signed as one of the 1942 Tokyo Raiders.
Notice Betty Hayes was a Rosie the Riveter.
Mine: The Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) is the number one rated attraction in Phoenix, the fifth largest city in the country. It is also ranked in the top 20 museums in the United States. We wondered if MIM would live up to those lofty rankings. It did. It was also overwhelming.
There are displays of musical instruments grouped by continent and country. Each continent collection could take an entire day to explore!
Most displays also feature video of the instruments being played in a local setting.
There are some interesting instruments out there!
The featured exhibit at the Musical Instrument Museum during our visit was Ancient Musical Treasures from China.
This bone flute was found in 1986 and believed to be 7000 – 9000 years old. Its complexity suggests use in harmonies and in tuning instruments to different scales.
This Bianzhong chime set is thought to be 2500 – 2800 years old and is one of only ten known surviving instruments.
One of our favorite sections of the museum was the Artist Gallery. There are displays encompassing everything and everyone from Leonard Bernstein to Taylor Swift.
John Lennon’s piano is here.
One of the 2008 Chinese drums used in the opening ceremonies for the 2008 Beijing Olympics is at MIM. A link to that performance is here: 2008 Olympic Drummers
The first guitar John Denver ever owned, given to him at age 12 by his grandmother, is also at MIM. This guitar was lost for a time and when found was the motivation for his song “This Old Guitar.” He tells the story and sings the song at this link. John Denver – This Old Guitar
Of course, an Elvis guitar is here!
We could play instruments ourselves in the Experience Gallery!
One time I went looking for Randy and found him here! Why is that not a surprise?
Ours: Arizona Science Center looked to have exhibits for both of us – a planetarium, IMAX theater and general science stuff for Randy and a visiting exhibit on Pompeii for me!
We started with the Pompeii exhibit which was fascinating and haunting. Pompeii was destroyed in 79 AD by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. The eruption destroyed the city but also preserved it. The exhibit holds hundreds of artifacts excavated from Pompeii.
An upper-crust home in Pompeii had an elaborate courtyard.
A fresco from the first century.
Glass blowing developed in the first century. Glass and pottery were excavated from Pompeii.
Amphoras held wines and oils.
Jewelry found in Pompeii.
These coins were found in a pouch next to a body.
A mother and child
A young boy
This guard dog never left his post at his home’s gate.
It was a somber and touching display.
If you found the Pompeii stuff compelling, I send you back to the related Oplontis Project in the blog post from Montana, Fall 2016 Way Above Average!
We also had some fun at the Arizona Science Center. This Forces of Nature Display allows you to experience representations of tornado force winds and some mild earthquake rocking.
When we got to hurricane, we even had some light misting rain. That was a surprise!
We spent time figuring out where all the innards fit!
A retired meteorologist gave us a passionate lesson on climate change. Preaching to the choir….
And we had some science fun.
We’ve been to many planetarium shows and do not care to go to another on constellations. This planetarium offered different topics and Randy chose The Solar System. It wasn’t just a video production. It was an interactive experience with a gifted teacher.
I took this one photograph (no flash) before he told me they weren’t allowed.
I know this blog post is way longer than usual. I apologize! Each of the “yours, mine and ours” museums could have been a blog post in itself. But then I’d have had to come up with a new title!
Surprisingly, we’ve never been to a game that King Felix has pitched. Felix Hernandez has been the Seattle pitching icon for a decade. Our game didn’t have many regulars in the line up, but we finally had Felix. Unfortunately he got hit with a line drive in the second inning and was out. X-rays were negative!
The folks behind us were from Chicago and when first baseman Anthony Rizzo came up to bat, they talked about him being a Stoneman-Douglas High school graduate. Rizzo returned to Florida after the school shooting and helped where he could. It was easy to root for him knowing that.
Most spring training parks are shared by two teams. For example, Seattle shares their Peoria facility with the San Diego Padres. The Cubs have Sloan Park all to themselves and that allows for some individualization.
The other tickets I decided we had to have were to Hamilton, the traveling Broadway production being performed at ASU. When the tickets went on sale in December, thirty two shows sold out in four hours. Hamilton is a hot ticket on Broadway and all over the country. I hadn’t even known to try and get Hamilton tickets in December.
This is where we’ve lived for the last few weeks, D Street at Towerpoint Resort in Mesa. There are a number of Canadians from Manitoba staying on D Street. On this day there were six Canadian flags, and two American flags flying!
And there was this one! I don’t know if this flag represents a mixed marriage or Canadians trying to honor both countries.
There were a number of nice floats. This one represents the Peace Arch at the international border between Blaine, Washington and Vancouver, British Columbia.
The story evolved into a 100% non-profit restaurant whose mission it is to provide “chef crafted meals and caring conversation to cancer patients.”
He also wants time for the occasional golf game. Especially if it involves our nephew Sean, brother Tim and Sean’s brother-in-law Kyle.
We began with Rhythm of the Dance, a Celtic style troupe from Ireland. The dancing was great but we enjoyed the music and varied instruments just as much. This photograph is from their website because our camera just didn’t take good low light pictures. It also had another dust spot and wasn’t opening and closing well. A camera just doesn’t last in our lifestyle. It is always in my pocket or purse and gets pulled in and out and knocked around. I’m hard on them but if we’re going to have pictures for the blog that is just the way it is. So, we bought an updated model at Costco. Randy read the manual and I need to!
We were interested in how the new model would perform in low-light. We took pictures at the LeeAnn Rimes concert at the RV Resort next door. The pictures were marginal but we found two that were usable. The concert was better than the pictures! LeeAnn Rimes has a beautiful, powerful voice and sings a variety of music genre. Like many vocal artists, she has re-worked the songs from way back and that was bittersweet.
Because the concert was at the next resort over, we thought we’d save ourselves parking issues and walk. That worked well going at 7:00. Coming home we were four minutes late to access the back gate and had to walk a mile plus to get back around to our resort’s front gate. The blocks are big here!
We enjoy western dinner theaters and visited Rockin’R Ranch for their version. This is a family operation and daughter Chelsea was great pre-dinner entertainment. Family dog Montana has apparently heard the show too many times and just wanted to go outside.
We enjoyed another family of entertainers – The Duttons. They were finalists on Season 2 of America’s Got Talent. Parents, siblings, spouses and grandchildren split their year between theaters in Branson and Mesa. The multi-generational show is good wholesome fun.
Food tours usually provide some local history. We began at the Old Adobe, Mission, the oldest church in Scottsdale. It began as Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church in 1933.
The city that became Scottsdale was developed on land owned by former Civil War Army Chaplain Winfield Scott. Arriving in 1888, he called his community Orangedale. It was eventually renamed for him (Scottsdale) but also had the moniker “The West’s Most Western Town.”
We had Stetson salad at Cowboy Caio! It was delicious, unique, and we got the recipe!
We finished the tour with three small cookies at SuperChunk Bakery. I ate the first one before I remembered to take a picture!
That being said, we are enjoying, but not loving, our RV resort. It is clean and has lots to do but the spaces are really tight. I spent the first week deciding on my on-going activities. Zumba here and Line Dancing at the resort next door made my list but drumming for exercise did not.
Randy and Elko settled right in to relaxing in the sun, doing never ending chores, and chatting with the neighbors. Here Randy is reading about his new satellite tripod.
Elko enjoys the dog park and one or both of us take him four or five times a day.
This drink looked like a good idea, but it really tasted AWFUL.
Scorpion hunting at Tim and Yvette’s house has been a bit of a bust this year but really, that’s a good thing!
We picked grapefruit from their trees and oranges from their neighbor’s trees.
This sign was posted at Randy’s parents’ cabin in the White Mountains many, many moons ago. Tim and Yvette have had it in their back yard for years.
The same outing took us to Superstition Saloon in Tortilla Flat. They advertise “Killer Chili,” and it was very good, but it was the wall paper that interested us the most!
There are $1 bills covering nearly every corner of the walls all around the large saloon. We were told (twice because I didn’t believe I heard right the first time) that there are over $300,000 on the walls! My guess was $4000 – I was way off! Pretty amazing!
The answer to the question was never important enough to actually drive there, but since we were in the vicinity – it was finally time!
Suffice it to say that The Thing is not the archeologic wonder they hint at it being but the whole experience was mildly entertaining for a tourist trap. (I’m not going to spoil the fun!) We enjoyed our Blizzards at the attached Daily Queen a bit more but it was wasn’t a wasted half hour.
Another question: Why are there miles of train engines sitting out in the desert?
Next question: After we walk 1.2 miles to the lake, will there be sandhill cranes? The area around Willcox is the winter home for sandhill cranes from all over North America. We could hear them from our RV park in Willcox.
We went looking one morning, but there was no guarantee….
When we got to the viewing area, there were no sandhill cranes at the lake….Fortunately, after we walked the 1.2 miles back out, we met some people preparing to walk in. We were able to tell them the cranes weren’t there and they told us where they’d just seen some.
We saw about 40 cranes (instead of hundreds or thousands) but we were only about 100 yards from them, much closer than we’d have been from the viewing area!
The unanswerable question: What happened to our calculator? Obviously this question has nothing to do with southern Arizona except that is where it died.
Randy brought this calculator home from Hewlett Packard to do evening work sometime in 1981 or 1982. Our dog, Anna, chewed the corner of the calculator and cover so it couldn’t go back to HP. It became our home calculator for the next 36 or 37 years. Once I got used to HPs “reverse polish” way of doing calculations, I never wanted to use a regular calculator again. It was chewed up and battered but it worked.
He looked anyway and found some loose bolts and some sticking tape, nothing that seemed to warrant the problems we’d seen. I found there was no one in Willcox able to work on something as major as a slide so searching out help in Mesa was our best bet.
The area is a geologic four corners. Four ecosystems meet in the Chiricahua Mountains including the Chihuahuan Desert, The Sonoran Desert, The Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Madre Mountains.
Geologists call the area a sky island because it is an isolated mountain range surrounded by a grassland sea. Created by volcanic ash, continental lift, water, ice and erosion, the pinnacles are beautiful! The Chiricahua Apache called the mountain pinnacles “standing up rocks.”
The Chiricahua Apache lived in the area for hundreds of years. They mostly avoided the Spaniards but bitter warfare erupted with the Mexicans when they owned Apache native lands.
In an 1861 incident known as The Bascom Affair, brash young Lt. Bascom was sent to the Apache Pass area to rescue a Mexican boy and return some stolen cattle. He mistakenly believed Cochise responsible and held him and his party hostage until the boy and cattle were to be returned. Cochise escaped but others in his party were subsequently killed. The incident sparked open warfare for eleven years.
There are remains of many of the buildings, some with a limestone covering to prevent further deterioration.
Better preserved is the former home of a young Swedish American soldier from Ft. Bowie, Neil Ericcson and his wife Emma. After his service, Neil and his wife moved the short distance into the mountains. They raised three daughters on their land eventually starting a guest house so people could enjoy the “Wonderland of Rocks.”
Their eldest daughter Lillian and her husband Ed Riggs eventually became the guest keepers. Lillian named it FarAway Ranch because it was ‘so God awful far away from everywhere.’
We weren’t able to go inside the guest house as tours are available only on weekends but that is just incentive to go back someday! There is a trail called Echo Pass we plan to explore (Elko wasn’t allowed) so we’ll do that too. Having waited so long to visit the Land of Standing Rocks the first time, we aren’t likely to wait so long again.
There are two show caves in southern Arizona with very different stories. Colossal cave is large with thirty nine miles of natural tunnels. It took two years to map the two miles of complex passages that are fully explored.
The cave was “discovered” in 1879, but artifacts indicate that it was long ago used by prehistoric peoples. The cave’s colorful history began in 1887 when it was a hideout for bank robbers and then bandits in the 1920s.
We were sad to see the damage done to Colossal Cave. Nearly every stalactite was broken off. The cave has been dry for many years so there is no new growth.
Our tour guide said the CCC also installed new cave formations “stalag-lights” to enhance a visitor’s trip through the cave.
There was no evidence of human visitation and very little evidence of animal trespass. Eighty thousand year old bones from a single Shasta ground sloth were found and identified. A full adult coyote skeleton from more recent times was also found.
We spent about three hours trying to get our new system up and working. The manual doesn’t match the current receiver interface and our “lesson” with the installer went awry when he couldn’t get the joey to work. Many thanks to our friend Dave in Yuma who answered lots of phone calls when our installer Charlie wouldn’t. We would intermittently get TV but the satellites wouldn’t lock in. It was a good thing Randy had sold our portable satellite at the park in Yuma or we might have gone back to it!
It was good to be done with the satellite system because we had socializing to do! We met Jean and Jess while volunteering at Umpqua Lighthouse State Park in May and this was the second time we’ve seen them since.
It was nice to be in the Arizona desert again and I hiked around a bit at ground level.
Randy hiked to the top of Picacho Peak – of course he did!
And then we had another visitor! Boise friend Mike, now from Bullhead City, met us at Picacho Peak on his way to Tucson to pick up his new motorhome! The next day we were to meet him again at Kartchner Caverns State Park near Benson.
But first we had to set the satellite back up again. Because we were now willing to have the system work without our full understanding, it only took 30 minutes. That’s better!
The next morning Mike headed home and we started exploring.
We went to Gammon’s Gulch, a movie set near Benson. The builder and owner, Jay, has quite a history in the film industry. He acted as an extra at age five and grew up in the industry because of his father’s work. Now 70+, he has a 10 acre set that he mostly built himself.
This chandelier was from the 1995 Sharon Stone movie (whom he likes very much) “The Quick and the Dead.”
The saloon, one of the few buildings Jay didn’t build, was created and left by a movie crew . It is movable. We enjoyed our Gammon’s Gulch visit a lot.
We spent 10 days at one of our favorite RV Parks, Fortuna de Oro, in Yuma, Arizona. Most people wouldn’t consider it a garden spot for travel but Yuma is exceptionally popular this year because of hurricane damage in Texas and Florida. To give Yuma its due, it is a garden spot for lettuce. Nearly all lettuce eaten in the U.S. November -through March comes from Yuma.
We also see Wisconsin friends, Myron and Peggy, each time we come. It was at their home in Wisconsin that we survived the storm of our lifetime (hopefully). That blog is here: 
Randy and I went back to the the old stomping grounds, Yuma Proving Ground, to look around and go to the Heritage Center Museum.
We made the most unlikely decision to go to a larger, heavier, 3-LMB tripod model – enticed by a more stable signal (my priority) and more simultaneous viewing and recording options (Randy’s priority). Purposely choosing larger and heavier is most unlikely while living in an RV!
Our installer, Charlie, had the new satellite dish up and the Hopper working in the living room very quickly. Progress came to a halt when the wireless Joey in the bedroom failed to sync up. Charlie spent the whole day troubleshooting unsuccessfully. He talked to five or six DISH support people and left very frustrated.
We enjoyed brunch with David and Cheryl, authors of Landmark Adventures at landmarkadventures.net. Socializing with other blogging RVers isn’t at all unlikely, and it sure is fun!
