Day one of the annual Ball family trip is now complete. We started the day by taking a long time to pack as usual and yelling at the kids. The first stop was the train museum in Ogden at which point my son, who loves trains, nearly exploded. We had lunch at Adventure Cakes which was expensive, but really quite good. I’ve never seen my kids down $6 grilled cheese sandwiches so fast. Our next event, one which is great when you have kids, was to wait in traffic for an hour to move 2 miles. It was one of those times when you wait and wait to see exactly what it was that was holding you up expecting to see some major construction or some serious accident and then when you are finally at the end and all the traffic starts moving, nothing.
We finally made it to the museum at Hill Air Force Base around 2:30. Those planes are much bigger than I remember from Desert Combat. They have an SR-71 which I’ve always thought was an incredible plane. One of the volunteers told me that most of the plane was used to hold fuel – 11,000 gallons which only lasted 4 hours. It cost $200,000/hr to run. Devin loved the planes. Most days he is limited to life flight which goes over our house about once a day and random hobby planes that find their way around Cache Valley. Trains and planes in the span of just a few hours, it doesn’t get any better than that for a little boy. Of course I also took his picture next to the ‘Trinity’ nuclear bomb. There’s a keepsake for a father to have.
We dropped by the LDS Church History in Salt Lake on our way through. They have a section just for kids. My brother Austin had a great time playing with the blocks. It is surprising to see what people brought across the plains in wagons. When I think of pioneers I think of families pulling hand carts containing a few worldly possessions like hard tack and gruel. A few brought much larger items like pianos. I’m still not sure how they did that. I felt bad for the guys who had to bring ours through the front door.
We went to Johnny Carinos for dinner. I usually having nothing but praise for the place. The server really greasy Italian food that you can’t help but love. Tonight we had to wait 20 minutes for anyone to pay any attention to us. They finally brought us water. An hour after we sat down we were finally allowed to order. We go there at 7:10 and didn’t leave until around 9:30. They were nice to us and brought us extra desert etc. However, they had run out of bread along with several of the items we ordered. The culminating moment of the day was when they ran out of lasagna and offered to bring us anything we want. I turned to Austin and said they can bring us fried shit for all I care just bring us something.
We bought muffins for breakfast.