We took a day trip to McMinnville to visit the the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum. The main attraction here was the Hughes H-4 Hercules (aka the Spruce Goose). Just looking at the size of the hangar needed to house this plane was impressive.
This is inside the fuselage near the wing ribs. The pontoons and part of the hull were actually full of beach balls for flotation in the event of a water catastrophe to keep the aircraft from sinking.
Unfortunately one has to pay more than we wanted to see the flight deck so the view was kind of limited.
Ava playing in a Chadwick C-122S helicopter. This was an early ultralight helicopter that someone had donated. Only a few were ever built.
Annalise was tired and pretty grumpy so keeping her happy was a challenge for all of us. She did enjoy playing on the wood airplane toy though.
One of my favorite things was seeing one of the engines that powered the H-4 up close. The Pratt & Whitney R-4360 Wasp engine was a radial engine with 28 cylinders, producing 4000 horsepower. Keeping 8 of these running would be such a challenge. This is about as big as combustion engines got before turbojets gained popularity.
On the way back to “home” we stopped for dinner at Mo’s in Lincoln City per tradition.
After dinner we went outside of Mo’s to the beach, which is also a great area for clamming. We ended up getting about 25 of these butter clams which are a lot of fun to catch.
Outside of Mo’s in Lincoln City
Mo’s sits just inside the bay’s narrow inlet, here’s an aerial view of where we were clamming.
