intrepid

Today we got up in reasonable time because we are going to see the USS Intrepid. Mum wasn't feeling very well so she stayed in the R.V... I mean home... Man let me tell you the Intrepid is a big boat... so let me tell you the story of us going to see it!

Getting our tickets was easy, we went through a metal detector, (like everywhere else we go in NY). The tickets included entry to 3 things, the concord, the submarine and the Intrepid. We decided to do... smallest to biggest... yep you got it, we did the concord first. Did you know this plane can go twice the speed of sound! Now that is was cool, there were lots of interesting facts, but if you were to fly in it, it would cost a lot of money!

Next we went over to the submarine, Did you know the submarine was a war ship from and was built in the 1950's (unlike the concord which was a passenger plane). The thing that made it inferior to newer ones is that it had to surface in order to shoot missiles, instead of under the water like the modern ones. It would be so hard to spend weeks down there, it is so small! Once all that was done we went to the big Intrepid, the WWII aircraft carrier. Did you know the boat has 4 propallers, each of them about as heavy as 10 cars, and can do a max speed of 37 mph! And the boat is 912 feet long! We started at the hanger deck where we watched 2 movies, the second one was much better so I will tell you about that! They had three big screens in the middle of the hanger deck that simulated an actual Kamikaze attack. In the middle 2 more screens came down which had two men explaining what was happening, there was even fake smoke, flashing lights & sirens to make it seam like you were there. It was soooo good!

We had a look at some of the exhibits on the hanger deck then made our way up to the flight deck. If you don't know the hanger deck is where they store & repair the planes that aren't being used, and the flight deck is where the plane take off and land! One of the volunteers gave us a book on the aircraft collection, so we read about the planes like... Grumman F-14 Tomcat that stared in Top Gun the movie (check out the pic) , and the Chance Vought F-8K Crusader which was the first aircraft to break the sound barrier on its maiden flight. Also when we were on the flight deck they took a bunch of people on a elevator that took planes from one deck to another in reasonable time! When we went on it we had to go slow but normally they would go a lot faster.

After the flight deck was the bridge - that was really cool cause we got to steer the rudders of the ship even tho the boat was not on. Instead of phones they used pipes we also got to play with them to!

The ship was really cool and it was sad to say goodbye but we were all eager to see the inside of the church that survived September 11, ( I hope you did your research) cause we learnt heaps more that day because the whole church was about that! It was quite sobering to think that someone could murder so many people in one go... but they did.

We took the subway back to the R.V like all the rest of the days... and all was well with the world... from D