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My Florida Trip (try it, yall will like it)

Posted by Brad on Wed Mar 10, 2004 01:14:29 AM

I had a couple of days off, so I drove from Charleston, South Carolina to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida and back. 1,227 miles in 38 hours. I stopped off at American Aero Services to see the Corsair and B-17, then I drove on down to Titusville to tour the Valiant Air Command museum, as well as see the Air America Foundation C-123's. After that, I went out to Glen Wegman's shop and had nice visit and look around. (Thank's again Glen) then on down to Ft. Lauderdale.

The next morning was spent with the great people at Aerial Signs Inc. The owner was good enough to let me look over his Rawdon T-1's, (same plane I'm rebuilding), basically disassemble the planes for pictures and dig through the blueprints and pictures that he has collected. This was the whole purpose of the trip, since I had never seen a complete Rawdon (or any other Rawdon besides mine, and it's in a thousand pieces) before.

I drove up to Kissimmee and spent a little time at Tom Reilly's place. It's just amazing what his crew has done with the B-17. It certainly has come a long way since I last saw it. I then made a quick trip over to Stallion 51 and looked at the four P-51's that were in one of the hangers. I wanted to see the FW-190 that is being restored, but I didn't have the time. Finally I drove back up to Charleston.

I'll have to go back down to Ft. Lauderdale pretty soon to dig through the Rawdon blueprints again. Hopefully I will be able to see some of the other warbirds down that way.

If all goes according to plan (which it seldom does), I'll be driving back down to Titusville on Saturday morning for the airshow.

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