Wyatt's Blog Entry
Continuing on with our trip, I just visited Brazos Bend State Park. I wanted to talk about it because they had alligators and I had never seen one before. The gators don’t move much, because they are cold blooded, which makes it easy to take pictures. A fascinating fact that I found was that they can go six months without eating anything at all. When my mom went for a run in the park she came back and told us that there was a mom alligator with babies and that we had to go see them. So after my mom told us all about the baby alligators, we hopped on our bikes and rode there. When we got there, we got to see them from about seven feet away! At first we were all alone but after a few minutes some people showed up and the mother started to move towards her babies (but super slow). They are also very sneaky because when you see them swimming, they don’t even make a ripple and the same thing when they lower themselves underwater. Those were some epic gators and I wish we had them up where I live.
Recently we visited New Orleans in Louisiana. At New Orleans we did an Escape Room called Special Ops. It is hard to explain, but I will try my best to tell you what it’s about. So we started off not knowing what to look for, but after a while we were finding clues left right and center. In Special Ops we were CIA agents and we had to find what was out of order and fix it. The lady at the front desk said that only 15 percent of the people who try, get it, but lots of the people that try come from the bar next door and are drunk. So we may not be as smart as we thought we were when getting out.
One of the other rooms there was Prison Break. In Prison Break you are each put in different cells and you have to get out. The doors aren’t locked on all the different rooms so that if you need to get out for some reason, you can.
My last topic that I picked to talk about was the Battleship Memorial Park in Alabama. The USS Alabama was a battleship that was put to work on August 16 1942. She had guns that held bullets as big as a fully grown adult. When we were in the ship they actually showed you the bullet chamber. It was so big that I could walk all the way out the top and pop out the end of the barrel! The ship was roughly 680 feet long and was about 108 feet in width. The captain had a room where he could go when they were at war that had 18 inch thick walls so that the attacking team was not able to hurt or kill the him. That was the first warship I have ever been on! The ship had a weight of 35,000 tons or 70,000,000 pounds, but when it was fully loaded with ammo and supplies it was at a weight of about 90,000,000 pounds. It was also 194 feet high. The speed was 32 miles an hour maximum. Her amount of horse power was 130,000. The ship went through quite a few storms and in one of them, she was with two other ships. The water was splashing onto the three of them. One ship was badly damaged because its bow was smashed into bits from the water.
The USS Drum is a submarine, it was commissioned November 1,1941. The sub got 12 battle stars for sinking 15 ships. The first part that we came down into was the torpedo room. There was four different spots to fire torpedos from. The second room that we ventured into was the kitchen. I was wondering if there was going to be an ice cream machine, because the last sub we were in had this ice cream machine and you were aloud it at anytime. Drum had a periscope that still worked and I could see right at the battle ship. The sub held 72 men. It was 311 feet long and 27 feet in width. She weighed 1,526 tons. The bad thing about being in a submarine is that the hatches between different rooms are small and if you bonk your head, it is pure metal, so no cushion.
At the park there was also tanks and jets and lots of other war machines with guns on them. There was this one plane that was called an A-12, similar to the SR-71 Blackbird. The A-12 at the park was about 100 feet long. The plane was shaped with all these curves because that shape makes it so that you can’t see it coming on a radar. It is crazy but the plane is only meant to hold one person. One engine was as big as a car and there are two engines. To start the plane they have to use a starter that is as big as a quad. That plane was used for bombing and catching people off guard. That was the biggest plane, for one person, I have ever seen! Too bad that I am only 10 years old, so I’m not old enough to fly it.
I can’t believe that it has already been eight months on the road and that we only have two more months left on this trip. It is going way too fast and it feels like we are time traveling, but I also can’t wait to come home. We will see what the next blog entry brings.
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