“Oh yes, this place is like the Energiser
bunny,” drawled the guide. “It just keeps on going.” So it was a great shame we
had only 15 minutes for the Chennault Aviation and Military Museum at Monroe,
where the guided tour is normally 40 minutes, followed by browsing. The rooms
are full of glass cases full of intriguing items (a Red Cross dagger; Nazi
eagle-with-swastika train engine plaque; original aviator sunglasses), the
walls and ceilings hung with fascinating stuff. Claire Chennault, despite his
girly name, set up the Flying Tigers to save the Chinese from the Japanese and
was afterwards presented with a fabulous embroidered Emperor’s gown (which, by
a creepy sort of coincidence, includes a tiny swastika in its pre-Nazi
incarnation).
The Selman Field navigation school was the
biggest in the US, turning out over 15,000 smart guys (the less smart became
pilots), one of whom guided the Enola Gay to Hiroshima. Aerial bombing is a bit
of a theme: the museum also covers the establishment of Delta Airlines, which
began as a crop-dusting company bent on eradicating the boll weevil from
Louisiana’s cotton fields, about which we’ve learned so much over the last few
days.
We had lots of ground to cover today,
literally, so we trooped reluctantly back on the bus to swoop past Bossier
city, which our driver told us was where Dubya flew to on 9/11 to hunker down
in the bunker; and then was stuck for anything else to say about the place.
Nearby is Shreveport, a much artier and
more interesting city, “Louisiana’s cultural Mecca” where Elvis hung out a lot.
All we had time for, though, was Artspace, in a lovely Art Deco building, where
we had a quick overview of the Moonbot studios exhibition. They are very
successful at animation. How successful? Two Oscars and four Emmys successful.
Impressive.
And then it was back on the bus again, a
boxed lunch, a stream of Twitter-news about Brexit, and goodbye to Louisiana as
we swooped into Texas, skirting around Dallas with a glimpse of the Book
Depository, before arriving at the airport to flit to LAX for the long trip home again on American Airlines' almost brand-new Dreamliner.