If you DO make it to Oshkosh, you owe it to yourself and your family to all head on over to one of the GREAT unsung garden spots where all the wealthy from Chicago used to go to summer–Lake Geneva. Stay at a place called The Abby and take the lake tour (a BIG lake) and scope-out all the summer mansions that are the equal of anything sea-side Rhode Island has.

OldT6Pilot is exactly correct, there is a certain amount of pain associated with attendance, but its worth it.

I usually stalk Burt Rutan and Jimmy Buffett while I’m there, but whatever your aviation taste there is a lot there for you.

I only flew in once ( http://tinyurl.com/aobd28 ). I’m glad I did, but unless I can somehow contrive to fly in on a show plane I think in the future I’ll go back to staying at an outlying town and driving in.

There is a forum for aviation bloggers, you could certainly be part of the show if you wanted even more glory than you derive from your excellent blog.

And when you publish your book I insist that you have a forum all of your own. There’s a retired O-6 who gives a well attended forum on the SR-71 book that he wrote. And he was just in the Air Force.

You will protest that the F-18 is a more humble ride than a Habu. Sure, but I bet you’d still sell some copies and have some fun.

Hey, I’m anything if not subtle…

Summer in Wisconsin can combine day temps approaching 100 followed by some mornings after the tornado inducing front that brought downpours that turn the convention site into a muddy quagmire where the temperature dips enough your short pant covered legs and T-Shirt laden exposed arms beg for the comfort of a $85 dollar sweat shirt that has some god-forsaken logo of proclaining EAA Oshkosh the soul of Aviation, or whatever. So you buy the thing only to, in a couple short hours wish you had a car to wax seeing you would never want to be caught dead wearing it again and, due to the steam rising from the previously soaked ground that mingles with the perspiration dripping from your ever ripening body, you have no other need for the previous purchase that due to the soft underside oppposite the previoulsy described logo, you have decided would make a great implement to wax a vintage ’56 T-Bird, if only one were available.

Getting close to 11AM you head over to one of the numerous food establishments to get in line for lunch knowing that, if you don’t start now you will no doubt risk passing out from low-blood sugar before you can partake of a $13.39 meal consisting of recycled cardboard disguised to look just like a hamburger patty covered with something that must be Wisconsin Cheese as, given the way it looks it could not be cheese from those laughing cows from Califronia because no beast could be happy producing anything resembling the drippy yellow paste coverering the hamburger patty replica on the three day old bun just ready to sprout the cure for cancer in all its glory if you don’t hurry up and eat the damn thing.

Then you can make your way through the crowd to stand around literally thousands of airplanes listening to bystanders offering such pearls of wisdom when standing next to a Corsair saying, “my grandfather flew these in WWII and shot down 30 Italian planes flying from a base in Norway…”.

So you get to enjoy all these things. And did I mention that there are more airplanes that week there than any place on the entire planet?

Oshkosh – I absolutely LOVE it. You absolutely have to go. It would give you blog material for a year….

Lex, you really must come to Wisconsin. Wisconsin is a pro NAVAIR state, after all, Marc Mitscher was a Badger.

Sandi, if you are ever near the Dells, let me know, and maybe we can meet. It would be nice to meet a fellow Lex admiring Badger.