After a brief unplanned, but oh so lovely, interlude in Minnesota, I was reunited with my home away from home, the camper which I had left in Joplin Missouri. I had winterized before I went back up north, and you always hold your breath when you un-winterize. You never know if you missed something or did something wrong. I was pleased that all went well with the small exception that I forced a switch and broke it. That maintenance list for the camper is really starting to get long.
I spent two days in Joplin, what with moving back in and getting road worthy again. I did do one tourist thing though, sort of a drive by tourist thing. There is a house that Bonnie and Clyde rented for a couple of months while they were hiding out from the law. They had to leave rather abruptly when murder and mayhem occurred.
Evidently you can now rent it thru Airbnb.
Texas is a big honkin' state. Luckily I was still fairly far up north and could travel across the Texas Panhandle. It still took me two days to accomplish this part of the journey. My last stop in Texas was Lubbock, Texas which according to one resident is nothing but a bunch of wind and sand. He wasn't far off the mark, but there were some redeeming aspects to Lubbock.
The Buddy Holly Museum is located in Lubbock, because this is where Buddy grew up. Buddy was a little bit before my time, but he was still quite the influence on the musicians that I grew up with. The museum was pretty exhaustive in the Buddy artifacts ( he had really big feet – they had several pairs of his shoes). Buddy died when he was only 22, so the timeline was pretty short. They did not allow pictures inside the museum.
This amused me
Because I paid my admission at the Holly museum, I got a coupon for half off at the Silent Wings Museum, the only museum in the world dedicated to the WWII Glider Project, something I knew nothing about and really didn't care too much about either. I had some time to spare, my coupon was good for $4 off and I thought why not. This museum was cool. There was a short movie which talked about the program. Some eighty percent of all the glider pilots (about 7000) in this project were trained in Lubbock. Besides interviews with pilots and generals and such, there was a lot of video footage about how they flew and even more importantly, how they landed. These gliders would come down, in a clearing behind enemy lines, on their bellies. They would skid along the ground until friction and a small little umbrella stopped them. Sometimes the landing was a little abrupt and they would get flipped up on the glider's nose. Basically, these gliders were crash landing. It took a lot of courage to fly in one of these gliders.
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| These are the campaigns where the Glider Corp was used. The first two were not particularly successful as they were still working out the kinks. |
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| An actual glider. Once landed, the nose would open up and the cargo (men, jeeps and/or cannons would disembark. |
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| Doesn't look like a particularly comfortable way to travel |
One of the highlights of Lubbock for me was that I got my camper washed. It had gone through snow and rain and it was nasty looking.
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