Hail to the Schnoogs

Holly had a minimum day at school yesterday, so we maximized our time to run some errands, have lunch and then go to the Reagan Library. We live just minutes away from the place, yet I have only been once (and that was sometime back in 1996 or so) and Holly hasn't been since she participated in (and won, I might add) a speech competition called We the People back in the 8th grade. It has been on my list of things to do (there's another item to check off!), so we ventured up the hill for the presidential treatment.

The visit did not disappoint as we made our way through the museum itself (the highlight of which in my opinion is the full replica of the Oval Office as it looked while Reagan was prez), the Christmas Around the World display (we have a debate raging on the best tree - I vote for a tie between Iceland and the White House 'Tree of the People"; Holly votes for France), and the piece de resistance...Air Force One.

This is not a replica...it's the real deal. It is parked on top of pedestals 25 feet above the ground and looks out through a glass wall that is some 200 feet high. Holly and I debated back and forth for a while on just how they got the thing in there - we finally had to resort to the website to learn that after being taken out of service in 2001 (it spanned 7 presidents and almost 30 years, beginning with Nixon in '72), it was disassembled, trucked to Simi Valley, pulled into the foundation of the pavilion, reassembled and then the building was completed. I compressed what was something like 3 or 4 years of work into this one paragraph, so do not let my creative license dampen the huge undertaking that this project was.

There were many cool items to discover all throughout the museum and library (a piece of the Berlin Wall, anyone?), several of which we have captured in our photo book here. Try to spot Holly and I throughout the landscape, we are the ones looking very presidential indeed!