Day 3 of the tourist tours. We chose to visit museums today as the weather was on the cool side. There are over 20 museums in Balboa Park beside the Zoo. Some are free but most have some sort of entrance fee. We got a one day pass to visit 5 museums.
First stop was the Air and Space Museum which had exhibits about our space history. One of the nine capsules shot into space is located in this museum. Another one is closer to our home in Hutchinson KS. I guess we’ll need to stop there one of these days. And what would be an air museum without airplanes - from the Wright Brothers all the way up to the stealth jets and bombers of today.
Next door to the Air and Space is the Automotive Museum which was featuring cars of the 1970’s. But they also had some unique automobiles and antique motorcycles. One of the unique cars was Louis Mattar’s Fabulous $75,000 Car. Its an 1947 Cadillac outfitted to run endurance non-stop trips. The first trip was from San Diego to New Jersey and back without any stops. The second non-stop run was from Anchorage to Mexico City. It towed a trailer that held 230 gallons of gas which fed the car and could be refilled without stopping. Also without stopping the car could air up the tires and hydraulic jacks allowed tires to be hanged while moving. The front seat held a tape recorder and hookah pipe while in the back seat you could find a washing machine, ironing board and iron, an oven, food storage, refrigerator, and a chemical toilet. The trailer also held water so you could shower plus it had a telephone and TV.
Another unique exhibit was the Plank Road from Yuma to El Centro across the Imperial Dunes. It was used from 1912 to 1926.
After lunch we walked through the Model Railroad Museum. It is so big that when they are running all the trains they use a control system that was once used on regular rail lines. The detail that goes into these displays is fantastic. In our pictures there is a scene with police cars and an ambulance stopped by a car with the trunk open and a body in the trunk! The big deal is that all scenes are scaled to the size of the trains. They use pictures of actual places to create landscapes, mountains, rivers and trestle bridges.
We are getting tired so the next two museums don’t get a very thorough examination. The Fleet Science Center is definitely for kids with lots of hands on activities and people to guide the kids at each station. The Natural History Museum is multi storied and features not just dinosaurs but whales and ancient sea creatures. A special exhibit of skulls caught my eye. There were skulls of lizards, mice, humming birds up to the apes & human, turtles and elephant.
We also were impressed with some of the architecture of many of the buildings.
Today we stayed in the city until after rush hour. A friend of ours, Austin, is a chef at a seafood restaurant where we stopped to visit and he prepared a couple wonderfully tasty dishes for us. The restaurant was next to the USS Midway.
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