As a continuation of yesterday’s blog post about the USS Clamagore and Laffey from visiting Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum, today’s spot­light is on the Medal of Honor Museum and the Vietnam Experience Exhibit.

The Medal of Honor Museum was inside the USS Yorktown (which I’ll show tomorrow). The Medal of Honor is the United States government’s highest award, and it is given to members of the military who distinguished themselves from others through great valor during combat.

As I mentioned in my previous blog posts, I don’t really have much background knowledge in history, so I didn’t really know anything going into this museum. My co-worker did, though, and he said that this museum was fairly biased—which is unfortunate, but also expected, seeing as this is an A­mer­i­can award in a museum in the South, and featuring Medal of Honor recipients of ethnicities of past United States war enemies might not yield the best reactions from some people.

For the final exhibit before closing time, we walked through the Vietnam Experience Exhibit. This was a hybrid indoor and outdoor exhibit, with the in­door section resembling a traditional museum with items on display, and the outdoor portion being modeled to try and emulate what it actually looked and felt like during the Vietnam War. They had speakers set up in inconspicuous locations to pump “war sounds” into the area, there were a hand­ful of huts that were designed to look like the ones in Vietnam, and a lot of the aircraft and vehicles were accessible so visitors could see inside.

There was a photo opportunity at the top of the watchtower; my co-worker eagerly told me to get in position and man the machine gun.

For the next tourist activity of Charleston, I was joined again by my co-worker to go to Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum. The museum is ba­sically four museums in one, with three ships and an experiential exhibit.

We attended a wedding over the weekend; I didn’t join in on the afterparty, but my co-worker did. This meant that he slept in and had a late start, so we only had about four hours to experience everything. The museum(s) is/are massive, and four hours wasn’t enough to see everything, even though we weren’t standing there reading all the information on all the placards. If you also want to go, I’d recommend a 4-6 hour trip at the minimum; if you’re an enthusiast who loves the topic, this is honestly an amazing place to spend the entire day from open to close.

Because the museum was so large, I decided to split it up into a few separate blog posts. The first two museums we went to were the Cold War Memorial inside the USS Clamagore (which is a submarine), as well as the USS Laffey DD-724.

The submarine exhibit outlined what underwater life was like during the Cold War so we could see it first-hand.

The main takeaway I got from walking through the entirety of the length of the submarine was how large and small it was at the same time. I had never been on a submarine before, and I’m not sure where I got this impression, but I assumed that a submarine would be more like a smaller boat, but capable of being completely underwater. I imagined the interior would reflect something like a private jet. I’m sure there may be some submarines that exist that are like this, but the USS Clamagore was quite literally an entire house crammed into a watercraft.

As I walked through all the different rooms, I realized that this was built for people to live in here for extended periods at a time—all the essentials were directly in the submarine. However, it was also extremely space-efficient, meaning, there was very little open space that wasn’t already being used for some important purpose. The one long hallway stretching across the length of the submarine required a good amount of flexibility and agility to nav­i­gate because of how narrow and short it was.

My co-worker asked me whether or not I thought I could survive in one of these for a long period of time. I do well with small spaces, so that wouldn’t be much of a problem, but I know for a fact that I wouldn’t be able to tolerate the smell and heat. The submarine had a section where it showed the en­gine and had a speaker emitting the sound of one engine… and apparently during normal operation, there are ten of them running at the same time, resulting in ten times the volume. They also produce an insane amount of heat, and it would be normal for it to be ~120°F (~48°C) in that room.

 
Next up was the USS Laffey, nicknamed “The Ship That Would Not Die” due to how resilient it was during the most relentless suicide air attack in his­to­ry during the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944, better known as D-Day.

During the tour, I found my locker.

You might not know this about me, but while I was still in school, I passionately hated history. It was my least favorite subject, I failed my Advanced Place­ment exam in history during high school, I took no history courses as an undergraduate university student while earning my Bachelor’s degree, and I quit my graduate program for my Master’s degree because their breadth of knowledge requirement forced me to take eight history courses to make up for my lack of exposure to history.

My opinion on the topic of history is slowly changing. I started feeling this way when I started going to more historical museums during my road trip, but I think the USS Laffey was the “tipping point” that made me realize that history isn’t actually really that bad, and the thing that’s bad is actually just the American education system.

After watching all the videos on the ship about what happened to it, seeing all the rooms and some of the equipment that the military used to fight to defend the United States, and literally standing in the same watercraft as the veterans with my own two feet, it somehow just occurred to me in a very surreal manner as to how “real” everything was.

This isn’t to say that I was doubting that any of these historical events happened; it was just that, when I learned about it by reading out of a textbook and taking exams, I felt many degrees of separation from the topic. By seeing all this in-person, it hit me as to how important and significant all this was, and how relevant this actually still is to modern-day life.

These museum exhibits were built in a way such that both history enthusiasts (like my co-worker) and history idiots (like I) could learn something new and have a nice experience. What made it even better for me was that, as someone who grew up in the middle of nowhere in the Chicagoland suburbs, and then lived east of the Santa Ana Mountains in California before moving to the middle of the desert in Las Vegas, I didn’t really have much exposure to water. The fact that I was just even on a tremendously large boat to begin with was an exciting experience, so being able to walk through both these watercraft was amazing.

After a good week visiting friends and sightseeing, my week in Seattle comes to an end. I have dedicated blog posts for the more notable things I did while in Washington, but for everything else, here’s a photo dump.

After my travel incident with a missed lay­o­ver and delayed flights, I decided that the best course of action for this trip would be to put Delta Air Lines on a temporary break take Alaska Airlines non-stop from IND to SEA instead.

The flight went smoothly, I got my usual scenic photos that I always do from the air, and arrived safely and early without needing to worry about lay­o­vers.

During one of the earlier days, I spent a night in a hotel near the airport because it had the cheapest rate and also offered free parking for my rental car, which is very rare for hotels in the Seattle area. I snapped a photo from my window of the view and a nice bridge that connected both halves of the street.

While meeting up with Doug and Allie, we also did some sightseeing at Lake Union and Dyes Inlet. I’ve seen Lake Union before because I went to Gas Works Park last year with our production crew to get some b-roll footage for our documentary, but this was my first time seeing Dyes Inlet.

One of the perks of having my own rental car throughout my trip is that we were able to get from place to place without having to rideshare everywhere or walk excessive distances. However, one of the downsides of having a rental car… is intersections like this.

To be clear, this is taken from the left turn lane of a two-lane road, i.e., there was only one more lane to my right. This traffic light had three lights, a sign that said I can only take sharp left turns, a sign that said I cannot turn left, and a sign that said I can also take a slight left, but make sure you don’t turn on red.

This sounds like a great opportunity to do a rental car review.

If you’re unfamiliar, I usually rent pickup trucks because I like the ride of a body-on-frame vehicle, and I find pickup trucks to be much more man­age­a­ble and navigable because my personal vehicle is a pickup truck and I’m much more used to it. However, sometimes, renting a pickup truck is just too un­realistically expensive, or they don’t have any left available in stock, so I end up with a different vehicle. When I do, I like to review them.

This time around, I ended up with a Mazda CX-5, a compact crossover with a 2.5-liter inline-four engine with 187 horsepower and 186 pound-feet of torque.

I’m usually not a fan of Asian car manufacturers. I acknowledge that they usually make very reliable ve­hi­cles, but I like a balance of reliability and fun factor, and Asian cars tend to be very boring. However, I’d say that the Mazda CX-5 was the least bad of all the low-trim Japanese cars I’ve driven.

The interior was decently nice, the screen was unexpectedly large, and the materials didn’t feel cheap. The engine was obviously struggling and acceleration was much slower than what I’m used to, but it still got me around town.

One specific thing I noticed with this crossover was that the brakes were unusually sensitive. This tends to be a recurring theme with Asian cars, where the accelerator is slow to respond but even the slightest tap on the brakes will lurch the car. It felt like this Mazda was a particularly severe offender of this, so it made for a bit of an uncomfortable ride if I wasn’t putting extra focus and effort into smooth braking.

Apart from that, it was a fairly average compact crossover—it had the perks of fitting into small street parking spaces and squeezing into narrow parking lot spaces, but it also had the downside of being lower to the ground, having lots of road noise due to the unibody composition, and feeling like all the other bigger vehicles on the road were about to run you over because of how short you felt.

And on that note, here is the continuation of another trend I’ve started on my website—my co-worker Erin, who I visited the second half of my week in Seattle, has a lifted Ford F-150, so I hugged it.

This trip was also the first time I had ever been on a ferry. I took a round-trip to and from either side of Puget Sound, and the motion sickness I felt from the ferry was much more manageable than the motion sickness from whale (fin) watching.

Funny enough, my second time on the ferry, my brain seemed to have adjusted very well to the boat, because I had little-to-no seasickness. But then, strange­ly, the moment we stopped and docked at the destination, I felt an overwhelming wave of motion sickness, almost as if my brain had gotten so used to the boat that it was now very confused and angry that we weren’t moving anymore.

Here is a photo I took of Seattle while departing on the ferry.

As I mentioned earlier, I thought this was a good trip. My trip to Seattle last time was good as well, and I’m thinking this has more to do with the people I spend time with while I’m in Seattle that has made it pleasant.

A majority of my thoughts and takeaways from my previous “Goodbye Seattle” blog post still stand, but there’s one more thing I noticed from this trip. Seattle isn’t quite as busy as New York City or Los Angeles, but it’s still pretty busy. However, it’s almost as if it’s a different type of busy.

When I’m driving around in Los Angeles or New York City, the traffic and congestion is borderline debilitating. If I’m trying to get from one place to another, I feel like I literally can’t, and if I try, I’m at the mercy of everything around me to sort of nudge me in a random direction, and I just have to hope that it’s the direction I want to go—sort of like being in the middle of a massive mob of people and being pushed the general direction of the mob’s movement.

Seattle, on the other hand, is also congested and has pretty bad traffic, but it’s still manageable. I can still make my own decisions on where I want to turn, and if I need to find someone who just got off the ferry and is wandering around downtown, we are actually able to coordinate and meet up at an intersection in a reasonable amount of time—something that is literally absolutely impossible in Los Angeles without having angry people honking at you and threatening your life.

I’m not quite sure why this is the case with Seattle, but I definitely appreciate it.

And with that, I am back in the eastern side of the country, ready to resume my homeless journey. I have a tentative plan to return to Seattle in mid-November, but until then, my road trip adventure is taking me to Louisville, Kentucky as my next destination. More tourism blog posts coming soon…