By the numbers:
- 470 miles from Crestview to Ocala to Tampa, Florida– 4745 miles for the trip – time for a service check for Dixie, our car.
- Skipped the blog yesterday after along day driving.
- 2 Museums – Air Force Armament Museum at Eglin Air Force Base yesterday. – The Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida today.
Saw another B-17 bomber, as was used by the eighth air force out of England during WW2. How would you like to have as one of your job duties?
Stick your arm out this hole in the nose of you plane to wipe off snow or frost so you can use your bomb site to make sure you drop your bombs over the intended factory. Keep in mind that you would be doing this while flying at 30,000 feet, at 40 degrees below zeor, at 250 to 300 miles per hour, and all this while also being shot at by enemy airplanes and flak guns.
Quite a collection of Dali art here. A collector wanted to donate it to a museum that would promise to keep the collection together and not loan it out to other museums in bits and pieces. The Museum here agreed to those terms so here is the world’s largest collection of Dali art.
He was a prolific artist and I won’t even try to comment on his overall work. One I found interesting was titled: “Gala Comtemlating the Mediterranean which at Twenty Meters Becomes a Portrait of Abraham Lincoln.”
Close up it looks like a typical Dali from that portion of his career when his paintings were jammed full of many apparently unrelated objects.
But from a distance it looks like a portrait.
Also took this picture.
Had some concerns that at a Dali museum there might a larger and confusing array of choices.
In Tampa for a couple more days. Probably no blog tomorrow.
We had heard the World War II Museum was a must see place to go and we were not disappointed. Spread out over 4 large buildings it is a pretty amazing collection of the 
President Eisenhower said that Higgins “won the war for us.” Without boats that could land on open beaches, he explained, “the whole strategy of the war would have to be rethought.” 
of the day we discovered that there was to be a fire works display near our hotel over Lake Pontchartrain. We haven’t been to a live fireworks show for a long time. It was more fun than expected.
It began as a animal and game path 1000’s of years ago, then became a hunting trail, then a bit of a trading trail, but took a more permanent form in the late 17 and early 18 hundreds. Farmers and traders from the Ohio and upper Mississippi Valley who wanted to sell their goods to people in the more populated Eastern cities would bring their products down the Mississippi on small wooden boat. After selling their goods there was no inexpensive way back up the river. Many sold their boats for the wood and then walked back up to the Ohio Valley. The primary route followed was the Natchez Trace. It took as long as 30 to 40 days to walk that trail and for a time thousands of people made that trek every year.
tal issues going on and trying to put myself in the place of the people involved in historical events is what I tend to find myself trying to do. Today, that effort to put ourselves in the shoes of the participants took on a special significance. Peg’s Great Great Grandfather, David Underhill, and 4 of his brothers all served in the Union army during the Civil War. They enlisted with regiments from 4 different states: New York, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan. 3 of those 5 brothers were here at Vicksburg. After the Civil War memorials and road markers were put up all around th
e area for each regiment that served here. We found the plaques listing the individual soldiers for 2 of the 3: Monroe and Arnold.
hills over which the battles were fought. The one we were looking for was several tiers down from the main road. After trying to climb down the tiers and barely making it back up we sought another way around and ended up walking almost half a mile to get all the way around the hill to the marker. 
Illinois soldiers who served here. I don’t often think about the fact that I was born in Illinois, but today for some reason that fact struck me. If I had been born 110 years earlier I would possibly have been one of those soldiers listed here.
sophisticated math was involved. The mound was built by carrying baskets full of soil from nearby areas up the mounds and building the structure layer by layer. With baskets of soil weighing about 50 pounds each the estimate is that it took about 15 million baskets full to build just the one mound.
es covers a lot of history but mostly a large number of old plantation sites in this area. We visited one specific site at the Oakley Plantation. This part of our country’s history is so sad. I have a hard time understanding the attraction that some people have to this era. Being here while so many conversations are going on about he confederate flag is very odd. The argument I have heard on news shows several times in the past week is that the Confederate flag is not about racism, it is about states’ rights. But I have to ask when I hear that phrase, “States’ rights to do what?” The civil war wasn’t fought over states’ rights to build roads, the right to provide schools or hospitals for citizens, or about how a state generally chooses to tax or spend its money. It was specifically over the “states’ right” to continue a system of support for one group of people to enslave another group of people and treat them as property. I don’t know if the confederate flag defenders don’t get that or if they don’t want to get that. The confederate flag is part of history but I have a hard time seeing how it should be the official part of any level of government anywhere in the currrent day United States.
l today as we just managed to finish our day before a thunder storm rolled through the area.
otel was this sign. We had a great dinner and I told the waitress I had only one complaint. Their prime rib is so good I can never bring myself to try anything else on the menu.
he day traveling in our air-conditioned car. This part of the country is so lush and green. It is really quite beautiful. We learned at the Big Thicket that for many years the Thicket was home to relatively few people, but that they could live a pretty reasonable life totally in the woods. The area is full of such a diverse range of plants, trees, birds, insects and animals that resourceful people could live a very self-sustained life just from the resources around them. In addition to using natural items for food and clothing and shelter, many medicines could be obtained from the Thicket.
t the people living in the Big Thicket was that many of us today might look upon such an existence as a pretty low level hard scrabble way of life, but they definitely lived according to Milton Wrights advice. Not needing or expecting support or help from anyone else. Of course we do not live in a world where everyone ascribes to that approach. At the point at which it was realized that the Big Thicket contained Big Timber and Big Oil, then Big Money stepped in, booted out many of the people living there
st part of travels to new places, whether it be physical travels to National Parks, or intellectual travels to other places and times like 1903 at Kitty Hawk, is when we can use those new experiences to reflect on ourselves and what we can do to make our work a better place.