Today's theme was boats. We went down to the Maritime Museum first, which comprises 6 craft, three sailing ships, two submarines, and a ferry. First was the Star of India (originally the Euterpe). This is the oldest iron-hulled sailing ship still afloat. It circumnavigated the globe 21 times, doing things like carrying emigrants to New Zealand (who would voluntarily emigrate from England to New Zealand in the 1800's?) before 'retiring' to an Alaskan trade route. It was a cool ship. Lots of sails on this one, and a video of a similar ship sailing through an Alaskan storm. Terrifying. It didn't seem like fun to work on this ship.
Next we visited a Foxtrot class Soviet submarine. In order to go into it you had to crawl through one of the pressure hatches (I guess so the larger tourists don't get stuck inside?) It was built in 1974 and had wooden toilet seats. The Things really liked it, mostly because there was one room where you could push buttons and it would make submarine noises. I thought the political officer's room was amusing. It really was just like Red October - there was basically a loyalty officer on board. And a guard outside the warhead 'room' that took anything that could potentially be used to sabotage the missiles. Can you say trust issues? Didn't look like fun to work on this ship, either.
Next up was the Rose, which played the HMS Surprise in the Master and Commander movie. Here we learned about scurvy and how the British figuring out how to cure it changed the balance of naval warfare. We also learned about how warfare on a ship worked. The Things liked the cannons. Sweetie and I thought it was a beautiful ship.
The Berkeley was next. This was a huge steam-powered ferry boat that operated around San Diego Bay. Most of the main deck was given over to a museum showing scale models of all sorts of different boats, many of them US Navy. The upper deck was set up with seats the way it was when it was a working ferry. Very fancy woodwork and stained glass windows.
We toured the USS Dolphin, a small US submarine built around the same time as the Soviet one. It was much nicer and more modern. The Things preferred the Soviet one, because it made noises. The last ship we saw was the Medea, a wooden pleasure boat built by a Scotsman to take him to remote areas of Scotland for hunting trips. It ended up being bought by the French military and used in WWII for a variety of things. A peculiar little history. I liked that one because one could call the steward from just about anywhere on the boat via a buzzer system.
In the afternoon, we visited the USS Midway. It served from 1947 to 1991 and was home to 245,000 men and women in that time. 4500 seamen crewed it. It is a very big boat. Thing 2 didn't really have the stamina to see the whole boat, and we didn't really have the time to listen to all 62 stops on the audio tour, so we just sort of wandered around. We looked at the hangar and the crew's quarters and the ready rooms for both the helicopter and jet pilots and then headed up to the flight deck. There were lots of planes and helicopters up there. I relayed much of my airplane lore to Thing 1 while Sweetie and Thing 2 listened to the docents and learned true information. Thing 1 really wanted to try the flight simulator, so we went on it while Sweetie and Thing 2 got a snack. In the simulator we were some sort of plane from WWII fighting some Japanese Zeroes. I have to say it was pretty fun except for when we got shot down. You spin out of control while heading for the ground.
We were pretty toured out at this point, so it was off to a new hotel (room on the 21st floor across from the Presidential Suite - so I guess we were in the Secret Service room). Their pool was under repair, so no swimming :( We decided to splurge and go out for seafood, so it was back to the waterfront. We ate at the Fish Market, which had a relaxed atmosphere and very good food. Thing 2 was being stubborn, so despite our appeals for him to try some seafood, he had pizza. Thing 1 had panko shrimp (and liked it). Sweetie and I had halibut, although hers was mesquite grilled and mine was a picatta.
One more day of vacation.
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