USA 2014: DAY 41 - McMinnville To The McMax

Hi y'all and greetings from beautiful Portland, Oregon, home of Nike and as mentioned in yesterday's Blog, a place with many bridges that span the Willamette River. In fact, Portland is also called 'Bridgetown'...I have the t-shirt to prove it. We thought about trying to locate a Nike Factory Tour, but since no Nike shoes are made in the USA, we figured the tour would comprise a bunch of offices with drawing boards.

Today we headed south west of Portland to a small town called McMinnville to visit the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum. According to one of the museum's Docents, she was surprised to see a bunch of Australians at the Museum, because '...this place is nowhere near anywhere'. I told her that this is our second time here and we weren't going to miss coming here. McMinnville is around 52 miles (85 km) south west of our Hotel in Gresham and around one hour's drive. The drive there is a nice change from the usual four-six lane freeways we generally see, so there is more opportunity to take in the beauty of upstate Oregon.

Yes, I know it's a four-lane highway, but it is quite pretty.

Gresham to McMinnville

The museum is pretty huge housing military and civilian aircraft and spacecraft; but, the prized display and almost the museum's reason d'etre is the incredible, huge Hughes H-4 Hercules 'Spruce Goose', the brain-child of Howard Hughes. This aircraft is pretty much on par with the Airbus A380 and Boeing B747 in terms of size (it certainly has a greater wingspan by a considerable margin), which is amazing when you consider that the aircraft structure is made entirely of wood.

The Spruce Goose was intended to be a transport aircraft to support the war effort during WWII. It only made only one brief flight on November 2, 1947, and the project never advanced beyond the single example produced. An interesting fact is that the aircraft is not made of Spruce, it was mainly built with Birch and this was due to the restriction on the use of Aluminium during the war.

Howard Hughes' H-4 Hercules 'Spruce Goose'

A model depicting the aircraft's manufacture. The detail is amazing.

Inside the fuselage, looking aft

A blurry Schuyler stands under the tail, showing just how big this aircraft is

Four of the Eight Pratt and Whitney R4360 Wasp Radial Engines

It's pretty much impossible to photograph the entire aircraft in its current setting

But the museum has a lot more than just the Spruce Goose. Lots of aircraft and some amazing space stuff. They actually have two Titan Rockets/Missiles, an SR-71, MiG-23, DC-9, Boeing B747-200 (x2) and other stuff housed inside and out.