The next day we went to go to Fredericksburg which was about 1 1/2 hours outside of San Antonio.  It was a German city and there was the home of Admiral Nimitz that we would see.  Who the heck s Admiral Nimitz?  I had no clue.  I figured he was some kind of WWII person.  I’m not into that stuff that much but Gary and his friend were “Oooooooh, Admiral Nimitz!  Cool, let’s go see that”  His wife was like me, “Ok, I’ll go along and enjoy the scenery but I am not going to read each and every sign in that guy’s house”.  How us women sacrifice to keep our men happy LOL.

Anyway, after our little drive with the wonderful scenery and good conversation, we got to Fredericksburg and saw the Admiral’s house.

Admiral’s house

At first Gary wasn’t too impressed.  He figured we were just going to be touring some old General’s house.  But it turned out this was a 6 acre, 3 museum complex.

3 parts to see

We went to the Admiral Nimitz museum first.  It was amazing!  I even enjoyed it.  It started out with some history about Nimitz.  Here was his baby chair

Dang! Looks familiar!

It almost looks like the one we used to have in our house, minus the tray.

I came upon his saddle

His saddle

Here is his crib

His crib

I must admit, we got a crib like this from Gary’s parents.  I don’t know how old it was but it came in handy when the kids were little and needed to be rocked all night.  You’d lay on the couch and had one foot on the crib rocking it back and forth.  Such good parents!

And I think this must have been his christening outfit

His baptismal outfit

or maybe not .  There was a bunch more stuff about this whole life, but I only took pictures of the interesting stuff LOL.

After we were done with that part of the museum, we meandered over to another section

Gary and his very tall new friend

Actual artillery

They had a section of war hero plaques

 Plaques

Then we went into another building.  This one had an exhibit of

Midget Submarine

This was one of the actual Japanese midget subs that attacked Pearl Harbor.  After they dragged it off the shore where it sank, they toured it around the US to encourage people to by US War Bonds.  They cut some holes in the side of the sub and put in plexiglass so people could see inside 

The amount of money they raised funded half the cost of the war.  Pretty impressive huh?Then we went around the corner, and there it was

Midget Sub

Front of sub

Rear of sub

Stats on sub

78 feet, that seems like a pretty big midget sub to me.  But I guess ours are about 560 feet long and 42 feet wide so, maybe that is a midget 

So we walked…..and walked…..and walked.  Man!  This place was HUGE!  It covered a lot of the aspects of the Pacific combat zones and it even had full size planes and boats!

Plane

Army Jeep

Australia (I think) Tank

Float Plane

Kind of a weird float plane compared to what they look like now.  Plus they had this neat cigarette holder

Sexy!

Anyone remember those from the days of yore?  Although I never saw one where the cigarette folded up like that, pretty cool.  You could maybe even put some twizzlers on it instead, for those of you that don’t smoke but have a sweet tooth.

We even got to see a Captain’s boat 

Not THE Captain’s boat, his looks like this 

Any way, back to the story.  They even had a replica of the bomb they dropped 

Plus there was a ton of other stuff and many, many plaques….of which I didn’t read too many.  I prefer a picture book about history so I don’t have to read it LOL.

Gary had read that there was supposed to be a PT boat there, some where.  So we had to continue our trek until we found it.  We finally asked someone, and found out it was in another building down the road, so off we went.  We passed this home that was being built

Build to suit

There was a sign on it that said if you bought it, they would make the inside just the way you wanted it.  Hmmmmm.  pretty good idea if you are in the market for a new home.

Finally we saw this sign 

aaaah, this must be the place.  So we walked in and saw….Ta Da!

Pt Boat

PT 309

PT Boat

And here is a little info on the engine that powers it 

Whew!  I’m glad I didn’t miss that 

So after all our walking and reading we decided to check out the town.  The main drag was a little touristy spot.  Plenty of shops and places to eat.  We HAD to go to the German Brewery, our friend was having German Beer withdrawals.  So we went to 

Established in 1994, hey, that’s not very old.  I hope it’s good beer.

They did have their own brewing vats behind the bar

Vats at the brewery

or maybe they were giant coffee urns, ya never know.  We did get some good beer AND food there.  With full tummies and having a buzz on, we drove home.  I should say the one who had water drove us home .

A fun fact of San Antonio.  They only have one major grocery store there called H.E.B.  It stands for Harry E. Butts, he is the owner.  Really!  Kind of like those book names from when we were kids, Under the Grand Stand by C. Moore Butts, Spots on the Wall by Who Flung Poo.  Haha, the good old days.

Well once we said our good byes, we headed back to the hotel.

We had a GREAT time visiting our friends and really appreciated them taking the time to be our tour guides.

Now, it’s time to head home.