August 4, Bellbrook OH

Slept in until nearly 9.  Half the day is gone.  A great night’s sleep.  Nice to have some morning time for a leisurely breakfast and more Olympics.

Around noon, we set off, first to go to our great nephew, Christopher’s, band car wash.  It was truly a band car wash in action, with the drum line set up right on the edge of the street to pull in business. 

Christopher made sure the car was correctly washed.

Then we went to visit some of the Wright Brother sites. The National Park sites of the Wright Brothers are collectively called The Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park. 

Clearly, from the Dayton Ohio perspective, this is where aviation was born.  This is where the Wright Brothers conceptualized and constructed their flying machines and where they really learned to fly.  While they acknowledged the first flights at Kitty Hawk, that location was clearly presented a matter of convenience of conditions.  Dayton at the turn of the 20^th century was a center of innovation with more patents per capita than any other community in the United States.

First stop was the Visitor’s Center and Wright Brother’s Bike Shop.  This visitor’s center is primarily focused on the Wright Brothers, but also an interpretive center for Paul Lawrence Dunbar, an extremely famous African American poetry and writer who lived at the same time as The Wrights, and graduated from High School with Orville.  The Wright Brothers, in their print shop business published Dunbar’s first newspaper. In their printing business, which they operated for many years before getting into the bike shop business, the brothers demonstrated their inventive mechanical ability by building their own printing press. It was also interesting to learn that they got their mechanical and mathematics abilities form their mother, not their father who was a minister. The second floor of the building housing the visitor’s center was the actual location of their printing press. 

Nearly next door to this was one of the locations that he brothers used for a bicycle shop.   We spent some time with a great park ranger who really helped bring alive how building and repairing high level custom bikes was instrumental to how they designed and constructed their airplanes.  We saw a wonderful exhibit that identified where various bicycle parts were used on the planes.  And the machine shop that was required for their bike business taught them how to manufacture the parts need for their planes.  The bikes they built and sold would sell for the equivalent of $3,000 in today’s money.

We had a nice light lunch near the sparklingly new minor league baseball filed in downtown Dayton.  Because Dick lived in Dayton for 20 years, he was very interested in how the city has changed.

The next site was the Wright memorial on the edge of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (named in part for the Wright Brothers, and Patterson who started National Cash Register Company.)  Near the monument was a great little visitor’s center.  The highlight there was a flight simulator where, with some quick instruction, Patti and Dick had the chance to crash a Wright Flier twice.  We hoped we would have improved but others were waiting for their turn.  Apparently it is harder that it would seem to fly these. 

The final Wright Brother’s site we had time to see was the Huffman Prairie where the Wright Brothers really learned how to fly in something other than just a straight line.  It was powerful to stand on that flied with a replica hangar building and catapult.  The catapult was powered by a large weight that was dropped within a frame pyramid, launching the plane down a rail and into the air.  We stood there and reflected about how the world would change due to what was accomplished on and above this modest looking field.  We learned that Orville Wright lived to see Chuck Yeager break the sound barrier, using the basic principles that the wright Brothers had identified and put into practice.

Then we had to turn from history, because there was a big family dinner planned at our niece’s house.  We so appreciated that all of John’s part of the family gathered for much of the evening to welcome us back to Ohio and learn about our travels.  We both had many wonderful conversations and interactions with the family young and old.  It was really fun to be together.

Patti especially enjoyed some imaginative play with 7-year-old Elena where they took on many enemies and took them out with sleep darts.

We appreciated how complicated it was for all the busy folks to get together, and it was great eating and wonderful company.

Back to John and Sajona’s for more late night Olympics.  We watched some of the swimming, which was terrific.