Sleeping On The Blue Ghost

The cub scout pack here does two overnight campouts a year. The last one happened a year ago...confusing? Well, this is 2020, so the second campout in March never happened. It was canceled, and we all got to see how much fun we could have camping at home in our normal beds instead.

After what felt like a lifetime of being trapped in our houses, however, they're letting us venture out a little bit right now before they lock everything down again in the winter. So, the fall campout was allowed to proceed, and it was a pretty cool one.

There is an aircraft carrier called the USS Lexington in Corpus Christi that was decommissioned and then turned into a museum. It fought in World War II, where it earned the nickname "The Blue Ghost"; was later decommissioned and retrofitted to handle jets; spent years helping to patrol the seas; then finished out its career as a training ship before being permanently decommissioned and converted into a museum in the nineties.

The museum has a program called Live Aboard where scout troops and cub scout packs can spend a night or a weekend on the ship, getting a complete and comprehensive experience on the ship. My son's pack decided that we would do that for our fall campout.

Corpus Christi is about a four hour drive, and we left early Saturday to make sure we weren't too late for muster. We probably overdid it by a bit, because we had more than an hour to spend on the beach beside the ship before they called us over to assemble and come aboard.

They brought us on board, and took us to our berthing assignments, where we got our beds set up and gear stowed, before heading up to look around the ship.

We went upstairs...well, up the ladders actually, they didn't really have stairs in the ship. I suppose that would have been wasted space. We had our run of the whole ship, but of course the first place we wanted to go was up on the deck.

That was where they had more than a dozen airplanes that we could look at. As a child of the eighties, I was most interested in the F-14 Tomcat.

What eighties kid didn't think that the F-14 was the coolest jet in the world. After all, G.I. Joe flew it in each of their cartoons:

And Tom Cruise flew it in Top Gun, one of the biggest movies of the decade. A fact that was not lost on the guys who prepared this plane for its place on the Lexington.

It wasn't the only aircraft on the deck, however. There were many. As well as some helicopters too.

The Lexington didn't have any helicopters on board when it was in service, but they have one there now. This is an AH-1 Cobra helicopter:

So much cool stuff to see, but we couldn't stay up there all day, because we had to meet down on the main deck with our group to start the day's activities. We had an opening ceremony, and then went to the mess area (which is just the museum's restaurant. When they have bigger groups they use the galley, but they didn't bother with that for our single small pack that barely met their minimum size requirements).

Dinner was tasty. After we finished, it was time to retire the colors. My son had volunteered to participate in the color guard, which he and the other guard members practiced for about twenty minutes before performing it. 

It was really cool to see, because of the discipline that our program director managed to instill in the kids in such a short time. I'm certain the guy was former military. He came across like a drill sergeant, yelling all of his instructions to us, and always finishing with, "Am I understood?" to which the kids began responding with a hearty, "yessir!" after only the third or fourth time he asked the question. He had the boys in the color guard working together to fold the big flag, jumping in to make sure things ran smoothly, and standing at attention in a way that I've never seen since my son started in cub scouts last year. Usually their flag ceremonies are disorganized messes, so I really liked to see this one.

Once that was done, we started up our scavenger hunt, which was a sheet of questions that we found the answers to among the various displays and tours on the carrier. Somehow, we managed to get one of the tour guides to agree to take us around and give us a tour while helping us find the answers to the questions. The first questions were about the flight deck and the bridge, so he took us up there.

We went back past all the planes that we'd just explored in our free time earlier, and answered the questions that pertained to them. Then our guide, who I believe was named Sam, took us up to the bridge, and we got to stand up in front of the tiller and give it a turn.

He took us through the rest of the bridge, giving us tons of info about it (way more than the questions on the scavenger hunt required). I felt pretty lucky to be the group that had the tour guide on the scavenger hunt with us. The most interesting fact I thought was that the bridge originally had no glass in the windows, but rather had been open to the air. That had to change when jets replaced the prop planes though, because the heat from their engines was burning the bridge crew, and they needed the protection.

Next, our guide took us down to where there were more deck guns. These ones were still a little maneuverable. So my son jumped on them and played and played. It was impossible to get him to leave it alone. To the point that the guide and the rest of the boys in the den were leaving without us. I had to drag him down so we didn't get left behind.

That was the end of the first section of the carrier, and we took a quick break when we returned to the main hangar deck. When we went to return to the scavenger hunt, our guide, Sam, told us that he'd just gotten a call telling him his brother (or maybe it was his brother-in-law) had just been admitted to the ICU with Covid-19. He had to go, and we sure couldn't begrudge him that, so we had to do the rest of the scavenger hunt on our own.

The boys seemed like they were done with the whole idea. Maybe we hadn't made it fun enough for them. I had been enjoying the tour, and really didn't care less about the scavenger hunt, but it was ostensibly what we were supposed to be doing. Now the tour was over, so I was willing to just let the boys play and give up on the scavenger hunt. One boy and his dad decided to keep going on the scavenger hunt, while the rest of us just played around until the next item on our agenda, the ghost stories program.

When the ghost story program came along, I was expecting my son not to want to attend. I kind of didn't want him to attend either, because the last thing I needed was for him to be convinced that the ship was full of ghosts and unable to sleep aboard when lights out arrived. I don't know if it was his idea or not, but he and his friends were all gung ho to go on the ghost tour.

Turns out I didn't need to worry, because as soon as we arrived at the first stop on the tour, he told me he needed to pee. We had to walk all the way back through the warren of corridors and ladders to the main deck to get him to the bathroom. By the time he was done, there was no way we were going to find them again. I might possibly have made it back to the spot we'd left them, but they had been about to move on, and I had no idea where that would be, so, no ghost stories for us.

Eventually, the rest of the boys reappeared from down below, and the kids played for a while longer, running riot around the ship, before we finally went to bed for the night. The main place they wanted to play was in the game room, but unfortunately all the games required quarters to activate, and there was no way to get any change with all the things on the ship closed down.

They called tattoo...which I guess means fifteen minutes to lights out, and that was when my son and his friend decided it was the perfect time to start a game of connect four from the board game closet. We had to force them to put it away, so we could get to bed before they turned the lights out on us.

The next morning, there was only breakfast and then a closing ceremony to cap the whole campout off. My son performed his duty as a color guard one more time, as they unfolded the flag and raised it back up on its hoist. 

He really scored big at the closing ceremony. Each of the kids who had volunteered to be color guards were given a little commemorative coin for their willingness to step up when volunteers were called for. 

Then they called up our group from the scavenger hunt. His team had returned the most complete and correct questionnaire, and they each received a poster of the ship as their prize.

Apparently the boy and his dad had continued doing the questionnaire all the way through to the end, so even though most of the boys had lost interest pretty early, they still managed to come out winners.

Lastly, they handed out patches to all the boys who were there, as well as all the parents. So, now even I've got one.

After the ceremony came to an end, we were dismissed. We still had our wristbands, and could stay on the ship for as long as we wanted to, though most of us were pretty tired from all of the walking on the tours and the poor night's sleep. 

There was also a service opportunity if we wanted to hang around until 10:00 AM to participate in that. Truthfully, I didn't want to, but I knew that I should. I thought of all those times I performed service with my Dad, and, for the millionth time in my life, my father's good example helped me make the right decision. I love you and miss you, Dad.

Turns out, not a lot of the other people in our pack had a dad as good as mine, because only my son and one other boy stuck around for the service project. They put us with an employee who showed us how to dust off and then wax one of the planes. We spent an hour and a half dusting and waxing a big yellow bi-plane. It was kind of fun, and I'm really glad Dad taught me to take advantage of the opportunity.

I don't have any pictures, because my phone was long dead at this point of the trip, but there was a publicist for the ship that took pictures and said that she would email them to our leader, so if I get them, I'll add them to the post and erase this line.

After the service project, we spent about an hour on the beach, and the boys played, while I talked with the other dad. Eventually, it was time to head for home, we couldn't put it off any longer. It was a four hour drive, so the more we waited, the higher the likelihood that we wouldn't arrive until after dark.

Unfortunately for my son and I, we would be arriving after dark anyway, because about two hours into the drive, the road started getting really, really rough. The car started to really shake, and then I realized that the road wasn't getting rough, my tire had blown. I pulled over to the side of the road, and traded my utterly destroyed tire for the donut spare.

You're not supposed to go over 50 mph on the donut, or drive more than fifty miles on it either, so I went to a tire shop at the very next city, which happened to be Victoria. The Walmart tire centers in our neck of the woods are closed for some reason, Covid I believe, but not so in Victoria, so I was able to get a pretty cheap price on the tire...or should I say tires, because it turns out I had a second tire that was also on the verge of giving out. Good thing it didn't go while I was riding on the spare.

We still had two more hours to get home, and it was well past dark by the time we finally got there. I was pretty tired, and I'm sure my son was as well. Unlike last night, tonight the two of us are going to sleep good.