I keep seeing things like that out here.

I am secure but not comfortable.

I'm trying to be a good boy about keeping this laptop safe (the last one got stolen out of my truck a year or two ago, for those of you who came in late). At the moment, I have the lock cable wrapped around a rung of bunk ladder. Reasonably secure, but a bit of a stretch when I'm sitting in the front seat.

And I pretty much have to sit in the front seat at the moment. It's cooled down fairly quickly tonight, but only outside. If I'm not next to an open window I am a puddle. I should be in bed, but not yet. Let it get cool enough to breathe in here first.

I did about 600 miles today. Not an epic journey, but a good bit of driving. With half a legal hour to go, I found a truck stop and parked for the night. As occasionally happens, there were some stores and restaurants within walking distance. More surprising, there was something to see, too. Closed, of course...

When I first saw the building from the highway I thought it belonged to a community college with delusions of grandeur. I mean, come on! A featureless concrete dome painted white, like a cue ball on a kicking tee? It looked like that, too--the building is earth-bermed, and has a roofline with one of those complicated sets of non-functional angles that architects periodically fall in love with. And the dome is MORE than a hemisphere. A white globe in a nest of white angular lines.

Something Significant Is Housed Here, it was designed to say. I doubted it, but what the heck.

I parked the truck and sauntered across the bridge to the other side of the Interstate, past the Bob Evans (temptation is everywhere...), and took a casual glance across the over-sized lawn at--a parked jet fighter? In chase-plane colors? From the early 60's from the shape. It kind of resembled a Douglas F4D, though I'm no expert.

Hmmm.

Then I saw the fellow with the kids in the empty lot closer to the building. Of course it was empty--at this hour the place had to be closed. But the lot wasn't QUITE empty. He was taking pictures of his kids as they poked around--

--an Apollo Command Module.

And there was a Gemini capsule sitting right behind it.

The interest level rose a bit. I trudged across the lawn and the empty lot.

As I drew closer, it was obvious that the Apollo, at least, was a mockup. No biggie--only somebody with an unlimited budget leaves the real thing out in the rain. It didn't take long to figure out the Gemini was a mockup, too. And right about that time I got an angle on the big sign.

I was in Wapakoneta, Ohio. And this was the Neil Armstrong Air and Space Museum.

Oh.

Maybe there's Something Significant in there after all.

According to the sign, Gemini 8 is. That's the one Armstrong flew, in the pre-Apollo days. And I don't doubt there's a bunch of other stuff.

It at least explains the architecture. Still more Show For Show's Sake than I like, but they really did have something they thought was worth making Stand Out. And it does look kind of spacey. In a good kind of way, I mean.

Maybe someday I'll show up here when it's still open. Or get rich enough to come back in a car.

Oh, yeah. The fighter. It was an F5D, not an F4D. According to the plaque, Douglas only built four of them (I think I'm remembering that right), and this was the only one left. Neil Armstrong had flown it in the early sixties when it was set up as a simulator of sorts. They were testing flight profiles for the Dyna-Soar, NASA's first step toward a functional winged spaceship. Call it the grandfather of the Space Shuttle. (The Dyna-Soar never actually flew, but it got the engineers thinking in a particular direction...)