Cross-Country Road Trip! Day 12, Mile 2451: The Higher You Fly, The Deeper You Go.

The sabbath has passed, and one of the museums we wanted to visit in Amarillo was open. 

The Texas Museum of Air & Space is tiny, but mighty. Right now, it consists of a hanger with a few exhibits and five planes outside. But they have big plans for the future. We were a little disappointed when we drove up, but we changed our minds as we walked around.

In the hanger, the main exhibit is this 1945 DC-3. The DC-3 was the transport workhorse of the 1930s through the 1950s. It was the first successful commercial airliner, and it reliably transported cargo and troops in every theater in WWII.

I love airplanes, and even though she is not the most confident flier, so does O. And the DC-3 is one of our faves.

So imagine how excited we were to actually be able to climb on board one.

The cockpit. Simple by today's standards, but still jammed with gauges and knobs.

One of my favorite airplanes is the G-Bee Racer. Designed for racing in the 1930s, it's a caricature of a plane, an engine with wings, with a tiny cockpit behind a gigantic radial engine.

So I instantly fell in love with this hot rod built to compete at the Reno Air Races. The airframe is a WWII Russian Yak-11 fighter. It's mated with a radial engine with twelve turbochargers from a B-29 bomber, taking it from 700 hp to an absurd 3200 hp.

That's some crazy shit.

Ho  hum. They have a Gulfstream II executive jet.

Ah, but this is a very special Gulfstream, indeed.

This one was used to train the Space Shuttle pilots to land the shuttle. 

What you need to understand is that the shuttle on re-entry was essentially an unpowered glider. A very poor glider. It was often called "a brick with wings." 

That description is a bit unfair, because the shuttle got lift not just from its stubby wings, but from the 'lifting body" design of its fuselage. Still, it wasn't a great glider.

So how do you train pilots to fly the shuttle in a Gulfstream? Well, you take it up really high, then you don't just turn the engines off, you actually reverse the thrust, so that the plane drops like a stone.

Or a shuttle.

Here's their description of the process. It worked, too. No one ever crashed a shuttle while landing.

The cockpit. The instructor on the right has full aircraft controls because this isn't a suicide mission. The trainee on the left has shuttle controls: just a joystick and rudder pedals. It's all stick and rudder when you're gliding.

This Canadian-manufactured DeHaviland Caribou transport saw service during the Vietnam War.

Their writeup.

The interior. The seats can be removed for cargo runs.

And we're ready for takeoff.

I'm ready for an attack run in my Cobra gunship. Cue "Ride of the Valkyries!"

Right next door to the museum is the Bell Aerospace factory that builds the tilt-rotor Osprey. We saw several flying around the Amarillo area.

A Pterodactyl Ascender. This ultralight was popular in the 1980s. 

After the museum, we headed south to Palo Duro Canyon, the second largest canyon by area in the U.S.

Unfortunately, Sad Monkey Mercantile is still a few months from opening.

So we thought that sign was random, but we were wrong.

The Sad Monkey Railway was once a thriving concern in the Palo Duro Canyon.

It was not a kiddie or a thrill ride, but a kind of celebration of the coming of the white man.

We did not get to see the Sad Monkey rock formation that inspired all of this, but here's a picture from the internet.

There was also a pathetic little memorial to two members of the local legacy herd of Texas Longhorns.

And then there was the gorgeous expanse of the canyon itself. An unexpected rent in the seemingly endless expanse of dry, flat Taxes plains.

Multiple layers of multicolored rock eroded into fantastic shapes.

Devil or goat? It's a question I've often asked myself about O. Seeing this weather-sculpted hill reminded me that both can be true.

The Lighthouse. This beautiful formation is at the end of a three-mile hike over mostly flat terrain. It's the climb up to the base of the rocks that is the killer.

But the views were spectacular.

 By the end of the 6.3-mile round trip, we were ready to be done, but we were glad we did it.

So we rewarded ourselves.

P.