TOD Tour 2.0 Day 61 - Darwin Aircraft Museum; Cullen Bay

Our last day in Darwin and a couple of gentle activities.

This morning, I took the short walk along the Stuart Highway to the Darwin Aircraft Museum. I've had a love of aircraft since I was a kid, probably in part because my favourite uncle was in the RAAF but mostly because my Dad had a lifelong fascination with them. He was making models from an early age and used to go down to Mascot aerodrome as it was then, hoping to see Kingsford-Smith taking off or landing. He was in the air cadets and at about age 14, he won a contest where the first prize was a joy flight. He threw up twice in the less than ten minutes in the air and a career as a pilot was nipped in the bud. His love of planes and his job which entailed lots of traveling, was again married over more than thirty years and ... he threw up a lot on commercial flights too. However, he never lost his love of planes and it was something he fed into his two sons.

The hangar on a far corner of Darwin airport holds one of the great collections of aircraft important to Australia. Even if you know nothing about planes, some of these might create a sonic boom for you: Tiger Moth, Spitfire, Sabre, Mirage, F-111. For the record, they were all important aircraft to Australia, especially the RAAF. Of course the elephant in the hangar - and she's quite an oversized elephant - is a former USAF B-52 bomber, who wore the colours of Strategic Air Command from 1960 for more than thirty years. You have to see this thing to believe it. Its wings are so long, they had to put an extra wheel out there so the tip wouldn't plow into the ground when it tried to take off fully laden with 300,000lbs of fuel!

Of course, you can get carried away with the stats until you stand in the bomb bay and realise the death and destruction this machine was made for. I did have a chuckle when a video I was watching described the B-52 as a weapon of peace.

This is a great museum for the seriously deranged aircraft fanatic because there is also loads of information available to read or watch.

I wish Dad had been there. Who knows? Maybe he was.

For lunch, I took Sue out on a date to the Cullen Bay Marina, where we ate barramundi on the deck of the Boatshed Coffee House, followed by coffee. Rather nice that. Afterwards, we took a stroll up to the seawards side and stood in the freshening breeze and looked out over the Beagle Strait toward the Tiwi Islands.

Not far away, we dropped in to see Burnett House from the outside. Located with three other residences built in the 1930's, high on a hill above the Darwin Casino, they are remarkable because they are the oldest remaining houses in Darwin and despite their exposed location, they survived both the bombings of Darwin and Cyclone Tracy, pretty much unscathed. When you stand there, its hard to imagine how either survival trick was possible.

Click for today's photos

That's that. A very enjoyable Darwin leg finished and early tomorrow we head off again, but unfortunately toward home. No disrespect to those we love who live there. Our return is a necessity for a variety of reasons and it will be a pretty quick one. We hope to be pulling into our driveway in eleven days.