The Titan Missile Silo my host and I previously visited was the sister museum of the Pima Air and Space Museum. I’ve never been a plane person, or at least, was never impressed by the fastest/deadliest but their roster of planes simply put included a metric f#ck ton of planes. Normally, this is where I’d link to a pile of them, but I somehow managed to erase the first half of the day completely from my camera. The second part of the trip was a visit to the UN Air Force’s “Boneyard”, a long-term storage area for retired, decommissioned, and for sale aircraft (about a 1/4 of planes there will be eventually sold to a friendly foreign government). The planes were in various states as the Flickr album shows (there’s too many to reasonably post in line) but most went through a USAF version of winterizing whereby the glass and sensitive bits would be covered with black and then white latex to protect the vessel from heat and the elements. The one part I really wanted to see was the chopped up spy planes and nukes that we leave out for the Russians to see as part of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty but they’d just cleaned out a pile of some 40 formerly nuclear-armed bombers.  Nonetheless, some of the views were impressive:

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USAF-provided valet parking.

The whole facility’s worth of planes would sell for about $32 billion and is the only office of the armed forces that actually makes money.
Back at the museum proper I learned that the museum had a sense of humor:

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Stealth Cactus

Also, they have another outdoor section that includes another ridiculous set of planes and a WWII bomber museum.
The day ended with a trip to a Tucson diner. I was glad that this was a diner proper down being open 24-hours a day and unattractive weight staff. They didn’t server fries, just tater tots which blew my mind. I’d aways associated fries with being fried and served in restaurants with tater tots being the closest one could muster from home. The existence of fried tater tots was something I had theorized about as a child but not until the age of 26 did I discover that they both exist, and are awesome.