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A visit to the Kingsbury Aerodrome

How could we have missed this all these years?   Dee was reading in the local newspaper about an antique car club meeting at Martindale on Saturday the 11th of November after which the car club was to motor to the Kingsbury Aerodrome for a judged show.  We had to take that in for sure.
We drove out of SM on highway 621 to Staples, then on to Kingsbury where we jogged  to the east just a half mile or so on Highway 90 and then south a short bit to the location of the aerodrome.

The aerodrome is really the grounds of the Pioneer Flight Museum.  Its a volunteer group that runs a large tract of land that has a grass runway, and a large area for display of war relics and such.  The attendees were mostly aficionados of aircraft and of restored cars and were spread out over the large area so that no area was too busy to chat with people at our leisure.

We chatted with one 72 yr old fellow who had similar childhood experieces to ours.  He went to a one room school, played with rubber guns, had a Hollywood muffler installed on his dad's car and even had friends who used the trick of installing a spark plug in the tailpipe exhaust tip.  He is and still is an accomplished car restorer and lives now in New Braunfels.  He was there showing his 1931 Chev roadster with all modern running gear.

Here are some photos. the first is two of the old planes, perhaps ones that I have never seen before except in pictures:  I think this particular airport has a lot of history as it was a Government controlled airport for a long time as evidenced by some old signage and the appearance of the metal building in the background of this photo.
This next photo shows the grounds and how open and uncrowded it was.

Heck, we even had music from this trio with Old Glory flying in the background


This fellow is all decked out in his WWI uniform and in front of a Model T which was an army ambulance.  All of these restored war relics ran and ran well.



On the way back home, we chose to stop at this church because it had a cemetery.  Not sure the age of this church and cemetery, but it has to be from the late 1800's at least.  We did not get a chance to walk among the gravestones as the gate was closed and locked.  There was  a family visiting a gravesite and when they came out, they hiked over the gate to get out, something we would have been unable to do to get in.  They said the gate had been locked because several cemeteries in the area had been vandalized in the recent past.

Click on any picture to see a larger view.




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