Sorry.... have been dealing with a problem back in Colorado these last couple of days that made me think I might be making a fast trip back to Denver this weekend. Still no real resolution to the problems yet, but the whole thing has been ratcheted back a notch for the time being, so no jumping on a plane tomorrow at least.

    Spent most of my day over at the 'Mariners Museum' in Newport News Virginia. A lot further drive over there than I thought, but well worth the effort. I spent more than 5 hours there this afternoon, and it still wasn't enough time. I should of figured it out when it took me more than two hours to just get through the 1st exhibited there in the museum. It was a whole history on the Civil War ironclad ships USS Monitor and CSS Virginia and their epic battle at Hampton Roads Harbor.

   A lot of the space was taken up with the search and discovery of the Monitor after it sunk in a storm. The museum had a lot of the actual parts of the ship and had full size reconstructions of not only the whole original ship, but also of the top turret as it had originally been as well as how it looked when they found and brought it up from over 200 ' below the ocean surface.

   The Monitor had been a new design for the US Navy and was built in reaction to the South building their own ironclad ship. Their ship was the CSS Virginia and it had started life as a pretty standard wooden Union Frigate. When the war broke out it was at the shipyard there in the Newport area and the Union forces actually set her on fire and sank her at the dock in order to deny the South from taking control of her. The South re-floated the hull, cut off everything above the waterline and built a new sloping wooden superstructure on top of it, reinforcing it with several inches of steel over the wood. They then installed a dozen or so guns, and put her to use sinking Union Men-of-War. She proved to be very adept at it too, pretty much devastating anything that came up against her without doing much harm to her at all.

    The two ironclads finally met in a heroic sea battle at the mouth of the James River in which they pounded each other for many hours before each withdrew to their own sides for various reasons. Never did learn why they didn't both just re-arm and then go back to it, but it may be that after firing hundreds of rounds at each other, nether one of them had suffered any real damage, while all the wooden sided boats in the conflict were utterly destroyed. Thus the age of wooden hulled military vessels abruptly came to an end that day.

   The museum also has the biggest collection of actual ship figure heads, so that was fun to take a look at. With whole displays on the history of navigation to the history of the US Navy to exploration around the world, it was a very enjoyable day. They finally had to ask me to leave as they were closing up this afternoon, and I still hadn't seen one whole building of actual small boats from around the area.

    Still a lot of places to explore in the area around Richmond so it is going to be a busy time. Lucky for me it is also starting to warm up again. By tomorrow it will be in the mid 60's again, I can live with those kind of temperatures. Will try to get some photo's put together in a day or two and get some of them posted.