We went down to Wilmington NC, on the coast, for a weekend break. The town is definitely a tourist destination but it also seems pretty classy - at least the older part of town by the river, we didn't go down to the beach. The main attractions were seafood and the museum battleship USS North Carolina. We drove in on Friday night and went to an oyster bar and got some oysters and a steamed sampler of everything else, which was delicious.
Saturday morning we headed to the ship. Those who may have previously complained about us visiting other major works of engineering will note that this one is fully set up as a museum and the exhibits are even in English. We showed up early but missed the tour lead by a human being because the group in front of us took the last spot. However, that turned out to be OK - they have an app for phones that gives the tour when walking around - it was a little shaky but it allowed a tour at completely our own speed and we spent about 3.5 hours touring the ship, a non-zero portion of which was assessing how various things had been manufactured because we are professional engineers and also nerds. A much higher percentage of the ship was accessible for touring (and some things even were functional and allowed messing with) than we'd expected and that was great.
Lousy picture of us on the deck.
The main gun turret periscopes seemed to be fully functional - drawing light in a binocular fashion from lenses about 40 feet apart (one on each side of the turret) and still very clear more than 70 years later with all controls working.
Despite having several hundred tourists on board, the ship was built for more than 2,000 people to live there. With most of it open for touring, waiting a minute or two would generally get you a space to yourself. We had the bridge of the ship to ourselves for several minutes to spin the wheel and sit in the captain's chair without being judged by five-year-old children waiting to do the same thing. Ana also enjoyed the buttons that made authentically obnoxious noises play over the bridge speakers.
Later on Ana found a kitchen mixer of a size that met her approval. I think it said they made 700 loaves of bread a day on board so they needed some scale.
We both geeked out on the machine shop - the available tooling was very impressive, and of course all of this stuff was made by hand and controlled by hand. Probably represented pretty close to the state of the art at the time and the quality (and scale, power, etc.) is still strong by today's standards.
After touring all morning and into the afternoon, we had a pretty nice seafood lunch followed by a nap followed by a pretty fancy seafood dinner that wasn't even outrageously priced.
We ended up both wanting two of the specials so we got them both, ate half each, and switched. Scallops and lobster both delicious. Sunday it was raining and we didn't feel like messing around, so we just headed home and got some stuff done so we didn't start the week completely behind.
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