March 18, 2012

• Our Adventures:  Portage Air Zoo!

  Last week we broke down and went to the Air Zoo.  I’ve wanted to go for a long time (having been raised an Air Force Brat, I have a thing about airplanes).  We’d heard mixed reviews – that it was a drag, that it wasn’t all it was chalked up to be… and then others said it was a great time.  I still wanted to go, and when we started thinking up adventures to have, of course this was on the list.

  
  Ethan’s Hornet… which we’ve actually seen before, last year.
  Painted navy/gold, the hornet is what the Blue Angels flew at the Air Show.
  

  
  I was afraid admission would be too expensive.  In 2010 and 2011 they had free admission to try to boost business, but of course I hadn’t heard about that at the time, and the boys were too little to have enjoyed it as much.  And it’s not a big deal, in hindsight – because all of the rides/simulators were $2 a piece, even then.  Admission now is $8 per person (with 4 and younger free), and comes with admission to four rides.  So it comes out the same as back in the days it was free!  ((shrugs))  Because Aaron and Baby O are both free, we came out to $40.. . not bad, IMHO, for a full afternoon of fun and education and adventure for our family of seven.

  I’d read a review of it on one of the FB mom sites that are local (I don’t know if it was GRKids or BigBinder or one of the others… there are a few local mom pages I subscribe to)…  The woman reviewing it said she wouldn’t have enjoyed it half as much if she hadn’t gotten the tour, and to DEFINITELY go up to the ‘free tour’ sign and get someone to take you around.   So I went in armed with that little tidbit of wisdom.

  We packed up and drove down to Portage (near Kalamazoo, only about forty minutes from our house, actually!)  It wasn’t hard to find, and Isaac was excited to bring along his airplane book – he got it for X-mess a few years ago, and those boys SCOUR that book.  He was certain he was going to see all sorts of planes from his book.  I knew for sure his SR-71 Blackbird was there, so he was GEEKIN’ about that.  Ethan wanted to see the Hornet.  Badly.  They were vibrating in the back of the car!
   

  
  P-40N Warhawk… hello, pink!
  

  
  First thing we saw upon going inside (and I have to back-up… there were SR-71s painted in silhouette on the sidewalk on the way in, and those boys were just PUMPED)… just above us as we went in was this insanely PINK plane.  Which you’d think they’d wrinkle their noses at, but it was in their book… right there, Mom!!!  Look!  It’s the SAME PLANE!!  And the immediately started rattling off facts and features of the plane.  Wha… I had no idea.

  We got our coats stowed and our wristbands on, and walked thru the tunnel of clouds to the big, warehouse-like hangar where the planes were.  And… WHA.  There were CRAPloads of planes, people.  When you walk in, it’s crazy-overwhelming.  The walls of this hangar are a mural – the world’s largest hand-painted mural, in fact.  And isn’t THAT kewl?  That alone thrilled my soul.  ((They have two galleries, too – one for women’s aviation and the other for general aeronautics… we d idn’t have time/patience for that.  We’re still young, remember.))

  First thing that happened was that a woman came up to us who said, “Have you been here before?”  Upon receiving our negative, she began talking a mile a minute.  Yikes.  Combine her with the place, and I blinked out.  Until my eyes landed on the ‘free tours’ sign.  Oh, YES.  That!  We’d like that, please.  So she hurried away to find us a retired vet to give us the tour.  And we had a moment or two to acclimate to the noise, dark, and crush of planes/colors.  The man she returned with to be our tour guide was John, and he was a nice older guy who’d served in Vietnam.

  
  

  
  Let me tell you – you NEED to have a guide if you go to the Air Zoo.  The plaques in front of each plane say absolutely nothing about them.  John reached in and pulled out bullets, showed us where they were fired from, what order they were fired in and why, told us what was special about the plane, or what it was used for.  One had been on the bottom of Lake Michigan (when the gov’t did training on the Big Lake off of a paddle-wheel carrier ship and the pilot-in-training missed the boat!)… things we wouldn’t have known at all.  This plane’s goofy smile, the reason that plane’s wings had five dozen holes in the wing flaps.  This other plane had crazy wheels, that the pilot had to hand-CRANK up (27 cranks, while flying!) until they were flush with the fuselage.  It was amazingly fun to hear all of his stories.  He knew everything about ALL the planes.
   

  
  Ethan in the cockpit of a trainer plane!
  

  
  But after about an hour and a half, he started to glance at his watch a lot.  I don’t know if he had a time limit on guests (nobody else seemed interested in getting a tour, but you should’ve seen people sidle up to us, to hear John tell about stuff!), or if he was going off-duty, or if he just hadda go to the bathroom… maybe he was sick of us?… but we parted ways amiably, and we headed on our own to the space wing.  ((YES, it had a space wing!))  There was a LOT of hands-on for the kids – they could look through a replica of Galileo’s telescope, see a real moon rover, roll around on a shuttle dolly and complete tank exchanges on a shuttle.  It was fascinating.
  
  

  
  Isaac changing connectors on the shuttle.

  
  THEN we went to the amusement part of the museum.  There was a hot-air balloon ferris wheel, a paratrooper bounce ride, bi-planes for the little ones, and some big ride that went FAST and hung, but the kids loved it.  There were flight simulators (3D and 4D ones), but they cost more and my kids are too little, so we stuck to the rides that came with our admission.  Then we checked out MORE planes (smaller ones, like crop dusters and bi-planes… and the Red Baron upside down above us!), and found a kids play area with even more little rides (a mini-shuttle, a one-man rocket, a helicopter… all free).  We were geeked that Icharus and Daedylus were on the mural in there – we just studied them in history and art, both!
   
  Then we got postcards for us and the penpals at the gift shop, checking out the SR-71 model – but it didn’t compare to seeing the real thing in the museum!  (Although I’d seen them growing up, when we were stationed in England during the bombing of Libya).  John had liked my little stories about the time I got stuck in the cockpit of a F-106 at Pop’s shop, and the armed guards on our schoolbuses in England, and the time we rode our bikes over a red-line and were held at machine-gun point (I was 16, in cut-offs, bearing doughnuts).  He thought I was a little nuts, but that’s okay.  His stories and mine made the tour experience all the richer.

  
  Isaac & Ethan with the SR-71 Blackbird.
  Note Ethan HAD to wear his Air Force shirt.
  

  
  And the grand finale was The Black Hole.  It’s actually just a basin for donations, but when you put your coin in, it goes round and around, closer and closer and closer to the vortex of blackness… my kids were utterly in suspense, especially Baby O, who wanted to rescue that poor doomed quarter.  It was fun… and we got a little crowd of kids as we cheered on the rolling coin!

  

  
  I hear they have frisbee golf at the Air Zoo, too?  We’re too young for that, and our trip came to exactly three hours, and we were done by then.  But we had a wonderful time.  We saw a lot of planes in the boys’ book, and rode a lot of rides, and learned more than I thought we would.  It was a great trip!
  

  • 11:28 am
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