The visit to the Dayton area is on the first full day of a long road trip. I am catching up on my blog posts while sitting in a hotel in Cherokee, NC. I have already walked over 15,000 steps today, and even though it is only 4:30 pm, I am beat after 5 days of traveling. I am looking out over a river, and it is quite peaceful.

In Dayton, my intention was to visit the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historic Park, which I did, but the day before going, I looked into the other things that were in and around Dayton, and found the National Museum of the AIr Force, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. I ended up going to the museum first. It is huge, and has several hangars full of aviation memorabilia. The first hangar starts with WW1 planes, then it progresses through WW2, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc... and ends with the space shuttle and other space vehicles. The museum is free, and has other exhibits other than planes, there are a ton of videos, you can go in the planes, and it is a great place if you are at ALL interested in military history.

The Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historic Park actually consists of several different monuments and such around Dayton. After the museum, I went and visited the Huffman Prairie Flying Field Interpretive Center, which is part of the NHP. This consists of a Visitor Center, a monument, and a field. The field is the location of where the Wright Brothers worked on their invention until it was a viable and reliable way to fly. The movie at the Visitor Center was about 30 minutes long, and gave a great account of the Wright Brothers journey. One interesting thing that I thought - even though the Wright Brothers had a Bicycle business, their plane had no wheels for landing gear - they used skids. Hm.

After visiting the Flying Field, I went downtown to the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historic Park Visitor Center - where there were more Wright Brothers exhibits, an exhibit about parachutes, and the actual building of the Wright Brothers' bicycle shop.

#Ohio