Airport play date

Yesterday we got a tour of the Columbus Airport courtesy of Earnie Shelton, a spry 90-year-old who’s been flying planes since the early '40s (and who’s the grandfather of our friend Theresa, who invited us for the tour).

Here’s Captain Earnie telling the kids about the airplanes in this hangar (I promise I didn’t tell Will to turn toward the camera and ignore the lecture).

Despite the fact that Will has made multiple airport trips and airplane flights to Colorado and back, we’ve never gotten this close and personal with airplanes and their engines


Or sat in a cockpit.
On Will’s list of airport tour highlights, getting inside this plane ranked right up there with seeing the “big jet plane” below take off . Here it was still several minutes from departure, and we were soon ushered away from the fence when we learned it was a U.S. Marshals Service deportation plane, with gun-bearing officials ensuring that all was in order. A slightly disquieting moment for us moms that sailed over the heads of the kids – and of course we didn’t do any explaining.

So all in all, the airport made for a pretty fabulous play date. And it inspired me to want to give hour-and-a-half tours of something when I'm 90 years old myself.