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Patriots Point

This floating museum is a retired military aircraft carrier, the USS Yorktown.  It also includes a destroyer and a submarine.  The visit was well worth the price of admission (which was $20 per person).  We could easily have spent more time here. 

A side comment: If we look like we are melting, it is because we were.  June in South Carolina is hot.  And we happened to hit a heat wave.  When we got back to the car at the end of the day, the thermometer shows 100' F.  Anne said "Oh, that is because it is sitting in this parking lot."  We drove off, and in a short while looked again at the temperature; it now shows 104' F. 

Looking up at the Yorktown:

The walkway over goes across a marshy area, where a Great Egret was looking for a meal.

Scrappy, the ship mascot, greeted us.  Scrappy was a dog who was smuggled aboard the ship by the sailors in 1943.

The tour of the Yorktown is divided into sections, covering different sections of the large ship.  One of the scariest items (which we don't have a picture of) was the dentist's office.  Can you imagine having dental work done on a ship with rolling waves? 

Paul took command of the ship.

And then worked the engines himself.  (Guess they need a few more sailors.) 

The signs explained how the post office was a favorite of the crew, since they could receive news from home and stay in touch. 

Mess hall must certainly have been another favorite location.  According to Wikipedia, this type of aircraft was designed for "a complement of 215 officers and 2,171 enlisted men. However, by the end of World War II, most crews were 50% larger than that."  (3500 is mentioned as the crew size on the sign below.)  Cooking for that many people must have been a huge undertaking.  It required big equipment and big recipes.

You gotta love a recipe that measures baking soda in pounds instead of teaspoons.

The tour includes the deck of the aircraft carrier, where many airplanes were on display.  It takes special arrangements to stop a plan on such a short runway.

There were many vintages of planes on the deck.

Anne considered using the anti-aircraft gun, but the seat was so hot she couldn't really sit down.

Here is a view of the bridge section of the ship, with Anne in the picture for scale.

With a ship this large, internal communication is obviously important.  We found the sound-powered phone concept interesting.  It probably wouldn't work very well for a casual conversation, but could be extremely useful in an emergency.

The museum covered more than just that one ship.  In addition to showing aspects of life on the ship, there were exhibits some on navel battles, memorials to soldiers lost in war, Apollo missions information, and other ships.  The Ticonderoga exhibit was particularly interesting to Paul.  His cousin Eddy Marocco had served on the Ticonderoga, including picking up one of the Apollo aircraft.

The submarine that is part of the museum was slightly nerve-wracking to tour, since it has obviously seen better days. 

Anne had been on a more modern submarine once, but this was the first time Paul had been on one.  Space is certainly at a premium.  Tall people need not apply for a position.

Activities are done in shifts on any sea vessel, but it is very obvious in a submarine.  The 'after battery compartment' served as kitchen, mess hall, recreation area, movie theater, training room, study hall, and more.  To get to the food storage area, the cooks had to go through a tiny hatch to a lower level of the submarine.  Claustrophobic people need not apply.

This page is getting rather long, so we will leave with a picture of the South Carolina flag, and a random picture of the destroyer.

 

Now we head

 

Updated July 2020