Sunday is the day before the airshow officially begins, and the busiest day for all of the other fly-in participants. If you came early like we did, you get to sit around and watch airplanes arrive in massive formations down to groups as small as single planes. From giant planes – like the massive B-29 Superfortress – one of only 2 remaining from WWII, to tiny planes – like the “flying egg”, they all try to get here before Monday. Up until this time, I was just participating in EAA Airventure (the real name for “Oshkosh”) vicariously through Youtube videos and stories told by my aviation friends. Now I’m here and I can hardly believe it.
It has been a while since I slept in a tent so I forgot about the “rude” awakening at 6:40 AM by the sun shining in my eyes. Then it further prompted me awake by kindly heating up the inside of my tent. I took advantage the early wake-up time to zip over to the shower building and get a nice morning shower.
Other than going to eat breakfast and dinner at the nearby restaurants, we spent our time trying to keep from baking in the sun. I decided to contribute to the group by hoofing it a couple miles to the nearest Walmart to acquire a cheap “Easy Up” tent. My original plan was to walk all the way back with the tent but that thing was HEAVY – so I got an Uber back. It was just what the group needed. We put up the pop-up tent and sat under it for hours watching hundreds of planes arrive. And that was just the planes we could see. Thousands more had arrived on the other runway that was active throughout the day. I’m including a picture of what’s called the “North 40”, which is the mile-and-a-half long camping area filled with airplanes and tents beside them. Since the area is so flat, it’s difficult to get a good photo to accurately describe it. But there is also a “South 40” with even more planes and tents, and yet another camping area for people who want to drive in to the show and camp in their RV’s.
For an idea of the scale of this place, I asked my Uber driver if he thought the locals were annoyed with all this activity. He said that most people are thankful to have the town size go from 60,000 people to 600.000 people, and all the revenue it brings.
We napped and talked about aviation while sitting in our camp chairs. I call mine the Bhudda chair for obvious reasons. In general we relaxed before all the long walking distances we will cover in the upcoming week.
