When the voice says “go,” you really should GO.

And then there’s the new exhibit, the Houston room. There have been four US Naval vessels named for our fair city, of which the most famous is probably CA-30, a heavy cruiser which was sunk in the Sunda Strait on March 1, 1942 during the battle of the Java Sea.

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It’s the largest model in the museum, and by this point my tour group had vanished and the Blue Hordes had caught up with us…

They’re good kids, and like all small boys (and make no mistake here, we’re ALL small boys when it comes to models and boats), this stuff is fascinating. They stuck around to catch the tail end of Mr. Drake’s story about the Houston and his explanations of the other parts of the museum’s resource stack.

(Side note: The latest USS Houston, SSN-713, is a Los Angeles class Fast Attack submarine; she’s currently in a shipyard in Washington, having been decommissioned and now being broken for historical museums and scrap. She’s had lots of mechanical issues and had a reputation as an unlucky ship, so there may or may not be another Houston in future.)