USS Arizona Memorial and USS Bowfin Submarine

This weekend, we went to see the USS Arizona Memorial. The Arizona was one of the ships that sank on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The ship was 608 feet long, and it sank in 9 minutes. 1,177 sailors and Marines died on the ship.

It is free to visit the memorial. We were given tickets with a visiting time on them. Rather than wait 2 1/2 hours, we went off to grocery shop and then went back to the memorial. There is an audio tour available, and it gets rave reviews, but we find that it is impossible to use these tours with Crumpet along. We took the 5 minute boat ride out to the memorial, and spent about half an hour at the site.

Here is the sunken ship beneath the memorial, taken from the air (no, not my photo...):
The memorial from the shore near our house (we took this on a different, much cloudier day).
One of the turrets from the ship:
Oil still leaks from the ship. It is said that the ship still weeps for its sailors. This got me choked up.
Crumpet was very interested in why the oil and water didn't mix, so we'll be doing an experiment relating to that next week!
A portion of the submerged ship- we saw a lot of tropical fish, and even a ray, here:
The inside of the memorial:
The names of the sailors who went down with the ship. There is also a list of names of sailors who survived, but came back to be buried with their shipmates:
Crumpet and his dad at the memorial, overlooking the USS Missouri (which I'll write about soon...):
The USS Bowfin submarine is located in the same complex as the Arizona. The long grey tube in the water below is the submarine. The sub is known as the "Pearl Harbor Avenger" because it attacked so many Japanese ships during World War II. For some reason, I had it in my head that children had to be 5 to visit the sub, so we didn't go in. (BIG tantrum ensued...) Now, I'm reading in my tour guide that children have to be 4. Oops, no one tell Crumpet...
Fortunately, there were other cool sights here, and the tantrum passed. A huge anchor:
Crumpet sitting on a torpedo with missiles in the background. Oh, how this boy loves weapons...

This is a portion of another submarine, which we were allowed in. The metal tubes in front are working periscopes, and it was fun to look at the memorials and our home island from here!
Inside the mini-sub:
A 'one man Japanese suicide torpedo'. Oh...
An American rescue chamber, designed to rescue sailors from submarines in trouble. The Navy only used this once, and it was successful. My husband used to ride subs, and imagining this as his only chance for rescue made me really glad he'll be on surface ships while we're in Hawaii!
Crumpet manning the guns (these would have been on a large battleship). We spent a lot of time here. As did several other families with young boys...

For more Field Trip Fun, visit Live the Adventure!

Arizona

After our stop in Memphis, we headed on toward Arizona. We spent two nights in Holbrook, AZ and visited the Painted Desert, Petrified Forest and Meteor Crater from there. All were within a half hour drive of our hotel.

The variety of colors in the Painted Desert made it really beautiful.

This area is called "The Tepees". The hills in the area all have this striped pattern, caused by the layering of minerals in the soil.

Below are the remains of Puerco Pueblo. This was once a 100 room pueblo housing approximately 1200 people. The original structure was built around the year 1250.
This is called "Newspaper Rock". There were actually several rocks at the site, all covered with hundreds of very clear petroglyphs. It's pretty amazing to think of people leaving each other messages here almost 1000 years ago.
The Petrified Forest was really neat, and odd. Out in the middle of the desert are hundreds and hundreds of logs, all beautifully crystallized. Apparently, this area was once a forest with many streams. When the trees fell, they were washed into the streams and buried in silt, mud and volcanic ash. The park brochure says that "the sediment cut off oxygen and slowed the logs' decay. Silica-laden groundwater seeped through the logs and replaced the original wood tissues with silica deposits. Eventually the silica crystallized into quartz, and the logs were preserved as petrified wood".
All of the black bumps in the picture below are logs. Weird.
On the way out of Holbrook, we stopped to see Meteor Crater. Scientists believe the hole was made 50,000 years ago when a giant meteor hit the Earth. The hole is 550 feet deep (60 stories, or the equivalent of the height of the Washington Monument), 4000 feet across, and 2.4 miles in circumference. That's BIG! Astronaut training has been conducted here in the past, and there is a model astronaut in the middle of the crater. You need binoculars to see it! There are other meteor craters on Earth, but most have been leveled by erosion. The site in Arizona is the most intact impact site on Earth. It was pretty amazing to see. There is a wonderful visitor center on the edge of the crater, but we didn't have much time to explore. There were cats in the car, and it was getting hot outside!
So, we turned on the air conditioning, and kept moving west...

For more Field Trip Fun, visit Live the Adventure!