Well, this is about the last historical phase of this trip. I bid a short farewell to Greta and John (I was planning to descend on them again on my trip back home), and headed out for Pensacola. For those not familiar with the Florida Panhandle, DeFuniak Springs is on one corner of the huge (putting it mildly) Eglin Air Force Base. I think the base may be half the size of Rhode Island, but don't really know. I looked at the Wikipedia entry for it, and that's huge too. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eglin_Air_Force_Base I could not find any statement of square-mile size in Wikipedia.
Anyway, I spent some time there in Navy flight survival school, and after we were married, Beth and I went occasionally to the Eglin Commissary (grocery store to you civilians) to buy stuff. The point of all this is that on this trip I rode through the place from DeFuniak Springs to Pensacola, and when I got to the operational area, ran into a security guard who demanded a "military ID." Lacking that, and not wishing to backtrack, I pulled out my FBI retired ID which he scrutinized, and pronounced: "That works for me..." saluted, and in I went.
Candidly, I love this stuff. I love to look at new military installations, old military installations (more about that later), love to see equipment, things, planes, old battlefields, and here I was in the heart and core of some pretty specialized stuff. Of course, I didn't see much. I did pass by a huge hangar beside the road in which the USAF stuffed an entire C-5A back in the sixties, and chilled it down to -40F. When I went by this day, something else was being tested and the temperature display read 125F. Wow! Well, maybe not...it was already 85F when I went by.
Anyway, soon I was out of Eglin, and went past the place where all the helicopters are black (Hurlburt Field...for those of you who harbor conspiracy theories). I rode on west and south, looking for water and sniffing the breeze for the odors of the ocean.
I was hoping to see & smell the Gulf of Mexico, but there were too many trees in the way, and then, there were too many buildings on the shore. This is not the way it was when I left in 1969.
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