Feb. 6: The USS Lexington

Yesterday was another dud day. We spent the entire day at the hobby shop that Larry bought the boat from. He put it in the swimming pool here in the park and ran it for about 3 minutes. Brought it back home to tweak up the sails and it quit running. It was 90 deg. here that day and would have been a great day to be in the pool. And our planned trip to the Lexington had to wait until today.

The USS Lexington is an air craft carrier launched in Sept. 1943, named after another ship that went down shortly after Pearl Harbor. Her motto was "From Tarawa to Tokoyo". This ship was finally put out of the war, temporarily, by a Kamikaze plane. She was back in service in time for her pilots to help make drops to the POW camps in Japan and the first carrier to sail into the Japanese harbor when MacArthur accepted the Japanese surrender. She was decommissioned right after the war and reinstated during the Korean War. She was there in the Vietnam War, too. After that, she became a training carrier for new pilots learning to land at sea. There were 1500 pilots a year certified off her decks. Because the Lexington was a non-war zone ship, she was the first Aircraft Carrier to have women placed aboard. A woman pilot made the last landing on the ship before the USS Lexington was decommissioned and sailed to Corpus Christie for a final show place.
Also, please recheck the King Ranch Blog. I finally added some pictures.

Tomorrow, I will be teaching a geo-caching class. We'll see how much fun that is.