Pacific Coast Air Museum Hot Dog Day

Our next door neighbor and her husband, who keep a plane at the Sonoma county Airport, volunteer at the Pacific Air Museum there. Every Thursday during the summer they have a fund raiser called Hot Dog Day. We ran into Janet this morning as we were walking down the street with Ozzie, and she offered us two tickets. OilMan and I are both partial to the occasional hot dog, and the airport is very close to our route from Kathy's house so we went by after our workout and checked it out.

There were lots of people there,* each of whom paid $5 for an excellent hot dog with all the fixings, a bag of potato chips and either a soft drink or a bottle of water. After collecting our food we sat around big tables in a hanger to eat and watch the crowd. As the picture in extras shows, there were lots of seniors, but many of them were accompanied by children and grandchildren who were free to climb into some of the planes and talk to volunteers about what kind of planes they were and what functions they served. Many of them were a bit the worse for having sat out in the weather since WWII ended, but that's why they have a fund raiser.

Even though I'm not a huge fan of airplanes, and the tiny cockpits of some of these planes, separated from the sky, by a thin plastic bubble, were terrifyingly claustrophobic, I loved the down home funkiness of it all and the enthusiasm with which the volunteers pitched in to make it work. 

For reasons he wasn't able to articulate, other than calling it 'sculptural',  OilMan really liked the Fighting Falcon F-16N Viper shown here in front of the huge hanger where we ate lunch. With a little fiddling with cropping and exposure, I think it looks quite abstract and sculptural as well.

It was hot out there on the crumbling tarmac where the old planes are parked, and one volunteer was putting down a towel on the seat in the open cockpit of one plane for the kids to sit on while he explained the workings of whatever was in there to them. We decided to pass on that opportunity and head for the Urban Tree Farm, a great nursery that specializes, oddly enough, in large trees. 

We were in search of a fig tree to plant in place of the late unlamented bamboo. Most of the trees near the parking lot were already sold, but we were taken in a golf cart to a distant location where we picked out a Brown Turkey Fig tree which will be delivered to our house next week. We had to negotiate with them to bring the tree up our driveway, as their policy is to leave it where the street meets the driveway, but that would have left us to drag it up the steep driveway we can barely drag ourselves up!

While we waited for the delivery negotiations to sort themselves, I noticed a couple of plants of the unknown type that we have been assiduously removing from all around the house for years, noticing that after almost seven years, there are only six small plants left. I scurried over and looked at the tag while the man who was paying for it had his back turned. It's an Australian native called 'Dianella' or flax lily. There are a lot of varieties of different sizes. I'm sure it's related to the larger phormium which is also from Australia, and which is also planted around here. There is an enormous one next to the hot tub which I have decided to learn to love because I DO NOT want to get involved in taking it out.