Sunday, February 12, 2012

Wendover??

For Christmas my sister in law had a great idea for presents for our husbands - tickets and a weekend away to watch Easton Corbin sing to us.  So my parents came up to watch the kids and we headed to Wendover for a little fun.  Matt and Emmitt love to sing Easton Corbin songs along with youtube - it is really cute actually.


There is no way to get a decent picture of him at the concert, so here is the best I could do.  We really had an enjoyable time.  There are some folks that can't actually sing live, but Easton Corbin did a great job and he sounded great!  I did decide that the rowdy crowd isn't really my idea of a good time, so I am glad we sat by some normal folks at the concert!  No surprise there!
 


We spent the night in Wendover and really enjoyed hanging out with Matt's brother Mark and his wife Emiko.  I am glad she had such a great idea and that we actually got these two farm boys and home bodies out of town for a bit!


 Saturday morning before we headed for home, we stopped at the WWII Wendover Air Field Museum.  It was really interesting.  Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bombs in Japan was housed in Wendover, Utah.  I can't remember the exact numbers, but 5 or 6 72-man aircraft crews were trained in Wendover as well.  Enola Gay's crew didn't just train in Wendover. The Enola Gay mission actually launched from Wendover. On June 14, 1945, the newly manufactured B-29 was ferried from Nebraska to the army base there. On June 27, 1945, it took off from Wendover for the South Pacific. After stops at Guam and the Marianas Islands, the aircraft carried out its historic mission on August 6 and 9, 1945, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan surrendered a month later.


 The museum in Wendover is just getting funding to refurbish the buildings left there after the US military closed the base in 1969, so it is a work in progress.  I still found it very interesting.  I read the book Unbroken, a World War II Story of Survival, Resilience,and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand last winter.  It is an amazing book - the true story of Louis Zamperini, a member of a B-24 crew that went down over the Pacific Ocean in May 1943.  
The museum has this C-123 that you can go walk through and climb through.  When I was in the plane, all I could think about was reading that book and the stress and turmoil going through Zamperini's crew as they realized they were going down, after many previous successful yet stressful missions.  I am such a hormonal gal at this point in my life, that I teared up in the plane and couldn't talk or else I would have made squeaking noises because of the emotion that filled my throat.  Same for the my emotions in the museum!  I am such a tenderhearted, patriotic baby! 
The plane I walked through in Wendover wasn't even used in WWII, but it still had an impact on my tender little heart.  The C-123 was a military transport aircraft that was used by the US Coast Guard in South East Asia and was the aircraft used to spray Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.
Matt has never been a history buff, nor interested in the war stories I have always found amazing and inspiring, but he did enjoy this little stop in Wendover and I was happy to share it with him.  I was happy to share the entire get-away with him.  It was a much needed time away from our sweet little ones.  We haven't done anything like that since we had kids - wow, that is crazy!  We reconnected and truly enjoyed each others company.

2 comments:

Krista said...

Glad you were able to have some couple time! Looks like a lot of fun! Who knew that there were things to do in Wendover other than gamble!

Rachel said...

Matt tried that too, lost $20 bucks and had the sense to call it good! It was a good couple get-away, for sure!

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