Even though this one-hour episode of Road Trip is titled “Cotati,” Huell actually spends his day exploring the wider area of both Cotati and Sebastopol in Sonoma of County. I’ve passed through both places along Highway 101 quite a few times and even enjoyed staying in Sebastopol on a number of occasions. So it’s great to learn more about the […]
This post was originally published as Memory Monday, Week 80, in August 2018. The pilots and ground crews worked very hard at keeping the planes in the air; but every once in awhile things didn’t go as planned. Two views of a B-24 Liberator after a hard landing:
You might not think that onions and redwood trees have much to do with each other, and ordinarily you would be correct. But in Vacaville, California, a beautiful grove of redwoods exists very much as a result of a lot of onions. As a kid, I never gave much thought to Vacaville except for those occasions in the 1960s and […]
I had never heard the story of the Solano Train Ferry until I watched this episode of California’s Gold from 2006. But I’ve traveled several times along the train tracks on the south shore of the Carquinez Strait and passed by the site of Port Costa, and I’ve always wondered about the many wooden pilings left standing in the water […]
This post was originally published as Memory Monday, Week 79, in August 2018.
This post was originally published as Memory Monday, Week 78, in July 2018. This week I have a gallery of some of the Mustangs based at Johnson Air Base in 1950.
I really enjoy sharing the driving duties when the Big Guy and I take a road trip, but unless I pull over and stop every time I see something interesting — not an idea that would go over well with my travel companion — I wind up missing the chance to photograph a lot of cool stuff. Here are a […]
This post was originally published as Memory Monday, Week 77, in July 2018. I’ve found plenty of photos of P-51 Mustangs in my dad’s collection; some of them, like The Trio, appear over and over. I’m sure there are great stories behind every one of these ships, and someone familiar with the marks and insignias might be able to read some of them. Note the World War 2 “kill” decals and the Cobra in the Clouds insignia on one of the planes below.
This post was original published as Memory Monday, Week 76, on July 23, 2018. Typing “39th Fighter Squadron” into Google gets me a lot of information about the squadron’s history in World War 2 and Korea, mostly focused on the pilots who flew missions over hostile territory. But I don’t find too much about the hard-working ground crews who maintained the planes so they would return safely to base after the day’s job was done. My dad’s photo collection focuses mainly on his fellow flight mechanics, and of course the planes they constantly took apart and put back together.