It Was A Duesy Of A Day

I don't even know where to start to write about yesterday. It was such a GREAT DAY. To start: we're in Newburyport, MA, hanging on the mooring ball behind our friends house. Gary and Alex split their time between their boat, the m/v Rhapsody in Blue, in St Pete where we met them and their home on the Merrimac River in Newburyport. Gary has his own plane, which we remembered when he buzzed us as we came into the river from the Atlantic. I mean, he really buzzed us, doing almost 200 mph, I couldn't even get a good picture, he went by so fast at right about mast height

To continue with my GREAT DAY. Gary is an exceptional pilot and can fly, well, everything. He volunteers at the Owls Head Transportation Museum in Owls Head, Maine. They have a big collection of WWI planes and Gary is one of just a few people who can fly them, actually he's the only person who can fly all of them. Anyhew, Gary flies up in his plane, about an hour trip, flies the museum's planes for them for the air shows and then flies home again. So for my GREAT DAY, I got to go along. In the really fast acrobatic plane. To Maine. I got to meet Melvin the Maine dairy farmer. I had a lobster roll for lunch. We did a roll on the way home. It set a new benchmark for the best day ever.

. Gary and Carl, the museum curator, doing a preflight inspection on the 1912 Curtiss Pusher.

Gary checking the 1917 Fokker Triplane before flight.

The museum has a 1935 Duesenberg (car) and from reading the info I learned that that's where the expression "It's a duesy" came from. Duesenbergs were so well made that they literally became the standard for all the others to try to meet.