Stafford Air and Space Museum

On Sunday we went to church in Weatherford. I attended the Sunday School class that Torrey teaches and then the Communion service at 11. It is more high-church than I would have expected in western Oklahoma.

And the people were nice. I know that shouldn't be a surprise, because there are good people wherever you go. But just listening to the news that's easy to forget, and let prejudices against other parts of the country take over and make you think people are like the public personas of the politicians they elect. No one I met volunteered that they relished the thought of executing innocent people, as one might expect from the news out of the state. But I digress.

For lunch we headed to Lucille's Roadhouse, an hômage to the classic Route 66 establishment that was a few miles to the east.

Torrey keeps in shape by swimming miles and miles. The temperature in his pool was low enough that he decided to head to the Y while I did my touristy stuff. So I drove his Prius (a first time for me) and dropped him off and headed to the Stafford Air and Space Museum. Gen. Tom Stafford is a native of Weatherford. His space flights include two Gemini missions, Apollo 10, and Apollo-Soyuz dockings, where he was noted for speaking Russian with an Oklahoma flair.

The museum doesn't look that imposing from the outside, but holds an amazing amount of artifacts as well as full-size models of historical aircraft. The whole back wall is taken up by a real Titan II missile, and there's a MIG, an F-16, and a defanged nuclear warhead along with the space gear. There was more than enough to keep me entertained until time to go pick up Torrey at the Y.

I had heard a couple of visitors speaking some apparently Slavic language that I couldn't place. When I was leaving and about to sign the register, I found that they are from Serbia, so I wasn't the farthest-traveled visitor they had that day. My entry made the "5" rating unanimous.