Mat's Slice of Heaven & An All Day Adventure

It's been a little while since the last post, we've been slightly swamped with a mixture of school, work and all the everyday happenings. :) We decided that this last Saturday we would spend the entire day on an "adventure"! Mat and I have been on complete opposite schedules since about the beginning of summer and really haven't had a chance to spend time with one another, so we planned a day for just the two of us!

First stop, lunch at the Mayan Adventure....this was the view from our table....Throughout our meal, we had a show of divers jumping from the top of the rocks down into the water below. It was neat to watch and the food was good. :)

Mat and I have lived in Utah for the last two years. We've spent many trips driving or flying past Hill Air Force Base on our visits to Idaho, we vow that we will stop, but have never made it until YESTERDAY! We took one trip up to Hill AFB for the Thunderbird show (the Blue Angels of the Air Force, if that still doesn't make sense, just ask :) ). I was born at Hill and have always wanted to stop by to see the different airplanes.

So here are pictures of the AMAZING things we saw, with Mat of course decoding which plane is which :):

When you pull up, you are greeted by an F-4 Phantom:

Inside the building, there are different "sections", the first section is the uniforms throughout the decades and how Hill AFB got its name. Then there's the aircraft throughout history - there was so much to absorb! It was just fantastic! With Mat's schooling he has studied many different aircraft and then to actually see them, it was simple a slice of heaven for him! Here's a neat one that Mat liked and couldn't resist taking pictures of.....a P-51 -"Audrey" is what this one is called (that's a B-17 behind it).

Now the second part was the "fighter aircraft" - I'm a lot more familiar with those simply from my family members being apart of the air force and Mat's interest in the military planes. So we have a TON more pictures of those....so here is the entrance of the fighter gallery:

And....
a B-25

a Pave Low (this thing was HUGE!)

This is a A-12, they are advertising it as a SR-71 Blackbird, but it's not. Similar, yes. But not the same, as Mat puts it. And mind you this is only the back half, we couldn't fit anymore of it in the picture it was soooooooo long!

This is a F-15 Eagle. This is considered to be one of the greatest fighters ever built.

This is a F-16 Falcon.

The one above is a F-18 Hornet. This is also the same aircraft that the Blue Angels fly, I couldn't get over how awesome it was up close! I felt like a kid in a candy store!

This was the view of the far corner in the fighter aircraft gallery. I completely recommend stopping at this museum if you are ever in Utah! For a while, Mat was contemplating on whether or not to enlist in the air force or air guard to obtain his flight training. While thinking that over, he fell infatuated with the A-10, one of the smoothest looking airplanes out there. If he would ever had enlisted, the A-10 is what he would love to learn to fly....it's that one on the left....

Here's a better picture:
The A-10 is also referred to as the WartHog.

We spent a good two hours going through each section and then we went outside where there's MORE!

This is the plane you see as you walk out of the museum doors - it's a B-1

This is Mat by the gear of the B-1.This is a B-29, Mat referred to this one as, "the goofy nosed one".This was standing right under the nose of the plane....This is the C-130 (with the B-29 behind it), this is the type of aircraft that Grandpa Haderlie jumped out of in his army days.This is Mat showing off his mad skills of touching the prop on a C-130....you can barely tell, but he's on his very tippy toes :)

This is a B-52. Uncle Rod flew these in Desert Storm, you could walk underneath each wing. The other interesting fact we learned was this aircraft could carry 60,000+ pounds of bombs.

Overall, we agreed that this museum deserves a second go to let all of the information and things to see to be absorbed. We also wanted to get so many more pictures, but couldn't help ourselves at being slightly "star struck". We're already thinking of our next visit!