Eglin AFB…The Air Force Armament Center

 

March 13, 2014

I have to recall Thursday morning, before leaving Eglin AFB. We stopped to visit the AF Armament Center museum. I knew Eglin had a very large bombing range covering 762 square miles of land and another 860 square miles of ocean to use for live fire and training of all types of aircraft and munitions. What I didn’t realize is how much testing and development of armaments they did here. It has a history going back to the 1930’s all the way up to the recent Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I actually got to touch a bunker buster bomb similar to the one that they used on Saddam headquarters in Bagdad. The bunker buster bomb was developed here at Eglin in 28 days, just before the Iraq war. There are so many bomb displays in the museum, each with a specific task.

The outside of the building has many aircraft on display. From the B-25 Mitchell that was used to bomb Japan, soon after Pearl Harbor, to the U-2 that flew at 80,000 feet over Russia.

I immensely enjoyed my visit. Helen is such a good sport about letting me do my thing at military museums. 

We left just before lunch and made our way out of Florida into Alabama. Of course, Alabama is a narrow state on the Gulf side.  The great Battleship Alabama was visible as we drove past Mobile. It didn’t take long before we entered Mississippi. We had planned to find a Geocache in this state as it was a missing state on our souvenir board. The Visitor Center was our first stop. I knew from my research that a cache was in this area. We fired up the Garmin GPS with coordinates and soon were heading for the woods. It was a short time later, that we found the cache and signed the log sheet, another state off of the list!

Onto Louisiana for the night. A town called Slidell with a Cracker Barrel was our destination. This one had a Wal-Mart across the street. By night fall, we noticed four RV’s across the street, but we were the only ones at Cracker Barrel. (Brand Loyalty you know)

Today was another travel day, mainly due to the weather. The front is moving east and we were better moving west and get the rain behind us. So, tonight we are just outside of Houston, TX in a place called Baytown. It is with regret that we didn’t stop in to say hello to our friends Sean and Lee in Houston. For some reason, we kept seeing signs saying that I-10 was closed in Houston. Maybe a accident or something? We don’t know, but we didn’t want to get tied up in detour traffic. The other reason is that we have to be in New Mexico for the marathon race. We both volunteered to help with this event. If Sean and Lee read this blog episode I wish to apologize for not stopping in to say hello. 

That is what we saw and did!