Ohio: Fighter Jets, Shamu, and Dinosaurs!

I mentioned in my last post that after we left Niagara Falls, New York, we were heading to Ohio to finish out our vacation. As you can see from the title, the trip was practically made for me, with all of my interests (except maybe the Ninja Turtles) being explored. We went to Sea World and the National Museum of the USAF while we were there, but before I talk about those adventures, I have to talk about the hotel we stayed in.

We were staying in a Holiday Inn, but this wasn’t one of the typical-but-functional rooms you think of at chain hotels; we were staying at the Holidome. If you’ve never stayed in one, the rooms are built in a circular fashion and face an indoor pool/exercise area/arcade/picnic area.  Now, I’ve been around enough to know that many of these things are fairly common now, but to my young mind at the time this was the pinnacle of luxury (read: the coolest thing ever). We spent at least an hour of every day there at the heated pool, or in the very shallow kiddie pool. I remember I had lost a tooth at some point during the trip, and had a grand time pretending to be a whale, shooting water out of the gap in my front teeth.

I was all about whales this trip because the second day we were there, we drove over to Sea World of Ohio. And when we got there I saw something I totally wasn’t expecting: a giant statue of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. That summer, Sea World was putting on a Dinosaur Adventure exhibit, and if there was anything I loved more than dinosaurs when I was that age, I can’t remember it now. We went down the trail first thing, and I still have vivid memories of the things we saw: an Allosaurus emerging from the brush as if it were going to attack the unsuspecting animatronic stegasaur that wiggled its head and tail periodically; a replica of a brontosaurus rib cage that served as a tunnel; an adolescent protoceratops that you could saddle up and get a picture on; and of course, a pair of pteranodons suspended from metal cables as if they were swooping over the faux jungle.

It had been a rainy morning, but had stopped just before the park opened, lending this Dino Adventure an extra enchanting aspect: mist was rolling off the the trees and bushes, just like the pictures of the steamy Cretaceous jungles in all of my books. After our brief tour of the exhibit, I was ready to go back through, but my sisters wanted to go see the rest of the park. What did they think this was, Sea World? I wanted more dinosaurs! But I was outvoted a million to one (the parents always have more than one vote, you know) and we went to go visit the penguins.

They were Emperor penguins, and absolutely huge. At around 4 feet tall, they towered over me, but it was still fun watching them waddle around and swim with their careless grace. My little sister laughed with joy at the “pingins” as she called them, a term which is still used today whenever my family talks about the birds. We saw seals, walruses, and polar bears to finish out our tour of the Arctic world, and then jaunted over to the Deep Sea Aquarium to check out the sharks. After killing some time there, we had a date with Shamu.

The show was pretty familiar to me, since I had seen a dolphin show before, but it was still impressive because it was the first time I got to see an orca in action. The sheer power of the beast escaped me at the time, but thinking back, Shamu was a beautiful creature. Like many of the orcas in captivity, she had a curled fin, but she could jump so high out of the water. We kids wanted to site down in the “splash zone” and let Shamu soak us with her patented “Pectoral Fin Splash” but our parents weren’t too keen on the idea. However, after the show, they took us down to the tank so we could at least wave at the dolphins. After that, it was a stop by Shamu’s Shaved Ice and the gift shop where we all got a stuffed sea critter, and then we headed back to the Holidome.

As I mentioned before, one of our outings was a trip to the National Museum of the USAF. If dinosaurs were my favorite thing, fighter jets were a close second. I was a Top Gun junkie, and owned about a million MicroMachine jets. I used to cup my hands over my mouth and nose like a fighter pilot’s oxygen mask and zoom around the house shooting down bogies. Needless to say, I was once again in heaven.

There were so many cool things to see there, including a holographic “history of flight” kiosk movie, with models and wax dummies of the Wright Brothers, Amelia Earhart, and Charles Lindberg, with their respective aircraft. One of my favorite exhibits was an interactive hangar, where there was a retired Harrier jump-jet that you could sit in (there’s a picture of me in it somewhere…if I can find it, I’ll come back and insert it in the post). At the other end of the gigantic room, there was a real B-25 from the second World War that we got to walk through and see its wax dummy crew hard at work. On the far wall, a replica of a C-5′s cargo bay showed off the sheer size of the airship, with a tank sitting comfortably within. I remember the diameter of the jet’s wheels being longer than my father was tall.

There was another section dedicated to the space program, with replica models of just about everything. I crawled through a command module and played with the thousand switches on the consoles with some other kids. We zipped over to the lunar module and climbed the ladder to peek into the thing Neil and Buzz landed on the moon. On the way down, there was an astronaut dummy that made for another perfect photo op. After that, we made our way to the cafeteria to eat some hot dogs and french fries. It was located on the third floor of the building, and we sat near a window so we could watch some guys fly their stunt kites in some kind of competition. After we got done eating, we were going to go watch the kite fliers, but they were already done. But, it was time to go anyway, so we snapped a picture of all of us standing near an F-15 that marked the entrance to the museum, and piled into the car.

And then, just like that, the mega vacation was over. We headed back to Indianapolis the next day, as we only had a couple weeks to adjust to being home before school started again. It all happened almost 15 years ago, but some of my fondest childhood memories come from my time in New York and Ohio. I need to make sure I tell my parents that they rock for giving us such an awesome vacation. I was a pretty lucky kid.

I’ll try to post here again in the next few days about our trips to Myrtle Beach. South Carolina – provided something else doesn’t break up my State Adventure series. Thanks for reading!

Tags: air force, dayton, ohio, sea world, states, travel

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 7th, 2010 at 9:54 pm and is filed under The 50 States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.