Took a while to get around to looking at my pictures, the usual end of the school year craziness. However, the June 14th trip to Lakehurst was excellent! Perfect weather and a nice bright day for pictures.
The tour meets up at the Cathedral of the Air outside of the base proper. The paperwork and such is dealt with there (mostly car passes) before they take you inside to explore the church. The highlights for me were the amazing aviation themed stain glass windows and the memorials to the US military airships that are in the front room of the church. Seeing the church alone was worth making the drive.
After the church, you drive into the air base itself to see the crash site. The tour director gives a talk there (ours was about 25 minutes or so), after which people take pictures. You meet up at the memorial, which is laid out in the shape of the command capsule of the ship. The talk goes through the history of airships and breaks down what went wrong, including passing some old pictures around. One of the fellows from the Historical Society had, as a child, seen the Hindenburg flying around over his house the day of the disaster, which was pretty neat. They also talk about the aftermath. This part of the tour was, by far, the best part. The only thing that would be great is if they would mark out on the ground approximately where each end of the Hindenburg was when it crashed. I only realized after I got home that it must have covered nearly the entire field we were in, that perspective would be nice.
View of the field from the memorial. You can just barely see the stub of where the tower was in the famous pictures and video footage (about halfway between the tower and the row of closer trees). I hadn't realized how far the ship was from the tower when it went down, the perspective is distorted in all the pictures.
Memorial on the ground. Again, this is the size and location of the command part of the ship.
Next up, the hangar. The two on the right were not there at the time of the accident.
After the crash site, you drive to the airship hangar. The group first goes into the tiny airship museum/gift shop. This place is tiny, yet it is absolutely crammed floor to ceiling with memorabilia from the zeppelins and the US Naval airships. Because I had a toddler, this part of the tour became too long. The information was fascinating and the guides were amazingly knowledgeable, but more time was spent here than out at the actual disaster site. Eventually, I had to walk the kid out because he was getting in the way.
Piece of the Hindenburg.
While the kid was outside yelling that he wanted to go back in (his Uncle was in there, who he adores), one of the guides who had seen us walk out, upset toddler in tow, came out to find me and offered to take us into the hangar early so that he could run around, which was really, really nice of him. I grabbed his Uncle (so the kid would be happy) and we headed into the hangar. Two things about the hangar - 1) it is so ridiculously big that I couldn't wrap my head around just how big that it was and 2) the US Navy's only remaining airship was in the hangar that day, because they are working on the engines. Now this airship was pretty darn big, but it looked like a toy in a hangar that size.
Our group caught up with us there, which was fine, I was happy to spend more time checking this place out.
Group shot - we had 13 folks with us, mostly family and folks I know from Scouts. Yes, even my two month old came along (he wasn't impressed, he slept through most of it). The total group that day was around 40, there was a group of 20 from a local men's group. The tours are almost never this big we were told. Fun fact - front to back, the Hindenburg had 18 inches of clearance on each end of the hangar. 18 inches!!!
We finished up our tour with a close look out the massive sliding outside doors (last opened in the 1980s - they take 7 hours to open fully) and a look through a small veteran's museum in the hangar which consisted mostly of old uniforms and tons and tons of intricate military models, which my 2 year old loved best of the whole tour. Overall, it took about 2 1/2 hours.
Overall, it was an excellent tour, all completely free (but make sure to make a donation to the Lakehurst Naval Air Station Historical Society who conducts the tours and keeps the museum open). Lots of great books in the gift shop on air ships.
Tours are the second and forth Saturdays of the month at 9:30 - 12:00 and are some Wednesdays as well.
See
http://www.nlhs.com/take-a-tour.html for more info on tours.
Afterwards we went to the Lakehurst Diner, which was not very good but did have a burger called "The Blimp". Rumor is you can only get it well done (ba dum crash).
Then the wife and kids and I went to Collier's Mill because I recently bought Whispers in the Pines (nice intro Ben) and wanted to check it out. Overall, a great day out!
