Troop 54 returned to the New England Air Museum in Windsor Locks, CT for our first time since 2012. Then, we traveled to Camp Sequassen in New Hartford, CT, our first visit there. We have visited a different Scout camp every month since September and have been to 22 different Scout camps since 2006.
We had three Boy Scouts and three leaders participating on this trip.
Of course, the museum features a lot of fixed wing airplanes of various sizes and vintages, both propeller and jet driven. In addition, the museum has an impressive collection of helicopters (aka. rotary wing airplanes) from manufacturers Bell, Doman, Gyrodyne, Kaman and Skorski. There were also exhibits from the blimp era and a fair number of space artifacts, such as space suits.
The museum has a number of Flight Simulator stations (the video game), which were the most popular part of the museum for our Scouts.
The docents at the museum were very informative, coming from strong experience with aircraft. One of them was a Sikorski retiree. He tried valiantly to help us understand how a helicopter works.
The camp staff had cleared the road to get us near the Nathan Hale site but not to the parking lot we had expected to use. It was a good thing we had not brought the troop trailer! Using snow shoes, we started by stomping down paths to and through the camp in the foot thick snow. We had planned to use tents on the snow but were pleased to find two Adirondack bunk houses at the site, in addition to lots of tent platforms.
After moving our gear to the camp site, partly by sled, the Scouts did a little sledding on a nearby hill. While there, they found a porcupine.
For dinner, the Scouts tried baking “Sausage Wellington” using Kielbasa and Pillsbury Crescent Rolls; this did not work out too well. Mr. MacNeal cooked hearty meals for the adults, keeping to a St. Patrick's Day theme.
One unique feature of this camp is the tunnel used by pedestrians to cross between the South and North sides of camp, across West Hill Road.
This was the troop's ninety-ninth consecutive month with at least one overnight camping trip.
