McMinnville, Oregon – Big Trip 2019

Wednesday 21 August –  rainy and 20 Celsius. As of today we have traveled 11,840 miles. We left at 9:10 for McMinnville, Oregon.  Home of the Spruce Goose.  Arrived at Olde Stone Village RV Park site 212. It’s a nice clean park with big sites and they are all cement although not level. I feel it’s almost too good for the likes of us. lol

 

We ended up at Golden Valley Brewery and it was okay. It’s a big place and is mostly a restaurant.

Then off to Allegory Brewery which is a really cute place with a very unhappy bartender. Very small inside but we sat outside and played corn hole and I won about six games in a row and when Clint won the last game…. we quit.

Then we went to Grain Station  for dinner and had some good food. Bar type food but really good and the place is very nice.  Kind of a neat place.

Thursday 22 August – 25 Celsius and sunny.  We went to the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum. What a place. It is fantastic.

There are four buildings; one is a water park that has an airplane on top of it and you can slide down the tube out of the plane, one building is a theater where we saw a space 3-D movie. The third building is Nassau, space, and helicopters and the fourth building is a museum where the Spruce Goose is located and a flight simulator.  The Spruce Goose is the plane that Howard Hughes built, the largest aircraft built completely out of wood.  This was built during WWII to move troops and supplies across the ocean.  Interesting history and worth a read.

It was $27 each to get in to all four buildings and we had a $4 coupon. It also cost  $30 for 4 people to do a tour of the cockpit of the Spruce Goose so we paid and  had a private tour.  Clint sat in the pilot seat where Howard Hughes sat to fly the plane. This whole place is amazing.

 

 

Clint paid extra to do the simulator, which was a hornet. He did a really good job and really enjoyed it. Two guys working there said he did a fantastic job.  While Clint was in the simulator, I could watch the him on a screen, quite a lot of fun.

We were there at this museum complex for five hours; there’s lots of aircraft and information and displays.   We probably could have spent more time there.

Outside of the main building they also had the Vice Presidents Plane from a long time ago.  You could go look around inside, quite interesting.

We left there and drove around a bit through the town.  We parked downtown and walked a few blocks to a market that was outside. We didn’t buy anything at the market and on the way back we stopped at the Bitter Monk and had a beer and then home for dinner.

Off to Kelso, Washington State tomorrow !