On the 4th of July I didn’t really have plans until the evening before when
I met up with mct around noon and we headed down to Penn’s Landing. By the time we arrived the line for the Farragut tours was stretched halfway down Penn’s Landing, no joke. We watched the line for about 10 minutes and it wasn’t moving, so we decided to explore the rest of Penn’s Landing and come back later to see how much the line had moved and if it was worth spending whatever amount of time in it.
At the end of the landing there was a submarine and a big 19th century ship, and a booth from the Independence Seaport Museum selling tickets to board the sub and ship, including tickets to the museum. You can go inside the submarine? Cool! So a couple tickets were purchased and we started out journey inside the submarine. Tickets in hand I took that opportunity to tell mct that I’d had several nightmares about dying in a WW2 era submarine and it’s going to be a bit scary to actually go inside one, but I figured I’d be good as long as it didn’t move (it wouldn’t, it was sitting on the bottom of the harbor and probably hasn’t moved for years). Thanks to mct for taking pictures :)
Upon decent into the sub I quickly learned that it was not scary in the slightest, the Becuna submarine was neat!
Me standing in front of some graph thing with paper in it (whoo technical!)
mct checking out one of the radios in the sub. If you notice above him is a red light – don’t let the flash fool you, this entire room was bathed in red like which gave it a sort of eerie feeling. Turns out they actually used the red lighting because it’s easier for your eyes to adjust from red light to dark than from white light to dark, so quite appropriate for use in this room with the periscope when one needed to look outside at night.
Torpedo room! The folks who worked the torpedoes actually slept right below and on top of unfired torpedoes since they were virtually harmless until fired.
Radio room. This is just one of the several rooms with tons of dials and switches. Neat stuff.
The USS Cruiser Olympia looked amazingly spacious after being inside the Becuna. The officers had whole dining rooms with wooden furniture and glassware that’s nicer than what you’d see in most homes! The regular enlisted men still got hammocks though. They had an operating room, dentist office, and all sorts of things on the ship. Unfortunately for us the upper deck was closed off due to the pilothouse reconstruction project.
After visiting the ships we took advantage of our museum tickets and went to explore that. They had a pretty interesting exhibit called Women & the Sea, and it’s companion exhibit Ladies who Launch. The rest of the museum was pretty neat too, if small.
By the time we left the museum it was around 4PM and tours of the Farragut had ceased. Perhaps for the best, I didn’t fancy spending a couple hours in line for some crowded tour. I enjoyed exploring the submarine a great deal more anyway. But mct did get close enough for photos of it.
From there we headed back to the suburbs as rain was threatening. We met up with Nita and had some pizza before I headed home. It ended up pouring for a good part of the evening. Some areas attempted fireworks, a friend of mine took a bunch of photos of the ones in Philly. Michael and I didn’t bother though, we just had a relaxing evening in.