Blaine Voyage

So in the midst of all of the immature and yet sadly serious insults and saber-rattling and missile tests exchanged by the man child in the White House and the man child in Pyongyang, our family stopped by Minuteman Missile National Historic Site a couple of weeks back on our way west from The Badlands.

Sadly, it’s not seeming as “historic” as it would have seemed a year ago, when the Cold War and Mutually Assured Destruction really did seem more like a relic of my childhood than a current existential threat.

At the visitor center museum, our kids got to learn about bomb drills (I was fortunately young enough to have avoided those, as they’d decided they did more harm than good by the time I was a public school student) and nuclear stockpiles and missile blast radii.

Elizabeth contemplating one of the exhibits.

Apparently Japan could have used these signs this past week…

So frustrating that this isn’t just history anymore.

Mutually assured destruction.

Hey Montclair, note that we’d apparently survive to see all of the devastation. Ugh.

The museum at the visitors’ center is well-done, but what is really incredible is to stare at a decommissioned missile in its silo a few miles down the road.

Looking through the glass at the missile.

A better view of the actual missile.

My kids thought that the loading door looked like a smile-y face. I tend to agree. Irony.

For kids, this is somewhat boring history. Let’s hope it stays that way.

And into every blog post, a little levity must fall, especially in the form of epic signs.

Now let’s just hope that cooler heads will prevail in both Washington and Pyongyang over the months and years to come. I’d like this particular site to stay historical, know what I mean?