In which Sid and Doris visit Charleston, take a water taxi and spend happy hours aboard an aircraft carrier and a destroyer.
Conveyance of yesterday must have been the near-miss train. The visit to Charleston brings many strong candidates but the first is a Golf Mk1, known locally as the Rabbit and surely a very rare bird now?
For lunch Doris finds a true Diner in Ridgeland where the crowd at the counter are getting into a TV show repeated from 4th July. This is a most patriotic sight as teams from the Navy and Army compete to guess the retail price of smalls household goods or camping kit items such as a mosquito-repelling smoke coil.
We call Mr Jolly a giant. Here he is by the diner, parked in the painted space showing how big giants are now. Note that the white strip of concrete is also available as part of the space. Doris said that actually she could walk to the kerb/sidewalk from there.
Coming into Charleston, Doris steers us to an open-air parking lot probably reserved for people who have come for the Carnival Sunrise cruise terminal. We drive in to be met by the gate guy: Man, you could have some crazy-ass road trips in that thing. He kindly points us to non-valet covered parking a block away.
The first day in Charleston is S and D’s 33rd wedding anniversary which Sid celebrates with metaphorical fireworks, no actual balloons, a real fine dinner and a small card. Doris is a fabulous companion and life’s navigator. Doris says that swapping Sid in now will be a great nuisance with no guarantee of finding anyone who will delight in uranium glass.
No more muskets, but next day the water taxi across the Cooper River to Patriots Point Naval Museum to go over the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown and destroyer USS Laffey, known as the ship that wouldn’t die.
The USS Yorktown was launched in 1943 and was in service through Korea and Vietnam to 1970. At 872 feet or 266m length overall this is a lot of floating real estate and pretty well every inch or indeed foot of it is open to visitors.
To sail the ship, run the turbines, fight the ship as well as fly and maintain 90 aircraft took 3,500 men. On board, along with the sailors, gunners and artificers, are chaplains, cobblers, dentists, doctors, barbers and cooks. These are the ingredients for 10,000 chocolate chip cookies – recipe on the left and the physical quantities in the picture on the right.
The flight deck is covered with painted canvas to protect it so we could not see the grooves where the steam catapults ran or where the lift delivered planes from the hanger to the flight deck. But there is an arrester wire across the deck which landing pilots must catch with their tail hooks or go around again.
The hangar deck has the WW2 planes and an explanation of the Doolittle Raid.
Carrier borne twin engined Mitchell B25 bombers set off to bomb Japan, knowing they could not land back on the carrier (not carrier adaptable) and would have to land in China, somewhere near where their fuel ran out. The raid actually left from USS Hornet, but an interesting exhibit. The raid did nothing like the damage of Pearl Harbor but was good/bad for morale depending on where you stood.
We hear a tour guide stop in front of a Grumman Avenger to tell the story of a bold Navy aviator who was taken prisoner and then redeemed for 2 gallons of ice cream where the punch line is: And you knew that man as President George Bush. He didn’t fly off the Yorktown but lots of Grummans did and there are Bearcats and Corsairs with wings folded.
Sid reads the very many information boards and Doris observes that there aren’t many benches.
The other ship at Patriots’ Point, the USS Laffey, was at the battle of Okinawa where it was subject of the war’s most sustained Kamikaze attack. Visitors go into the aft big gun turret, are taught what the 14 people working in that space would be doing, and are then narrated through the experience of being under attack, with much loud son et lumiere as Japanese pilots crash their planes into the guns. The ship survived and after various rebuilds having earlier been at D Day and later at Bikini Atoll, Suez and Cold War Med was retired in 1975.
It makes a change from Ante Bellum drawing rooms.
We return to find The Carnival Sunrise in dock. It is a beast of a vessel, complete with en-suite water park and is longer and wider than the USS Yorktown although not as heavy or fast. Also it is probably not capable of killing so many people.
