They’ve Got Some Big Boats Down There

 

Off we went to the bustling city of Corpus Christie to see the Lexington aircraft carrier, which was a WWII state of the art ship until it got blown up and sunk.  Then it became salvage and they hauled it to CC, fixed it up, installed a nice little restaurant area and let tourists walk all over it.

It didn’t take long for us to discover that seamen, in the 1940s, were all skinny little things who could climb like goats.  The stairs (aka ladders) were scary.  The bunks were the size of shelves.   Even the Brig was skinny.  And why did they even need a brig on a boat that size?  If someone misbehaved, you just had to make him go up and down stairs a few times to burn off the testosterone.  And if it was really bad, you just throw him overboard.  Boating accidents....happen all the time.

  But it was all very neat and grey and very well laid out.  What amazed us most was how short the flight deck was!  They must have to rev those babies up a lot to get them airborne because otherwise they’d be swimming.  Some of those planes were huge!  And all the wings folded up!  I don't know about you, but I'd be wary of a plane like that.  Just my luck the wings would decide to auto-fold when I was 30,000 feet up.  

I didn’t even want to imagine landing one of them on a moving boat in high seas.  Maybe that’s why seamen were so skinny – the adrenaline levels alone would have done it.

It was a great day.  Corpus Christie is a beautiful place, right on the Gulf Coast.  It’s too bad we can’t stay there because the salt air will rust the RVs faster than a billy goat sailor can climb a ladder.  It’s a nice place to visit, though!