On April 5th, I took Joshua and Lily to this year’s Mercer Area District’s Cubarama event at the Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurt military base nearby us at 7A. This year’s theme was Scouts To The Skies, all around flight. The only unusual component for the event was that we had to provide names, addresses, driver’s license number, etc, so that the military could check our backgrounds prior to arriving to the base. I heard it was at McGuire AFB, but after driving an easy 30 mins to the base, the soldier at the gatehouse had no idea why I was handing my driver’s license over.
Well, we thought it was nearby. All three bases were combined in 2009, but the Cubarama event. Turns out, Cubarama wasn’t at McGuire — it was at the Lakehurst Naval Station. The directions provided by the soldier sounded easy enough to follow, but we ended up lost somewhere at a live fire range. It took us about 2 hours door to door, from our house, to McGuire, to getting lost in the wilderness, to Lakehurst.
By the time we finally found where we had to be at Lakehurst, we only had about two hours left before the end of the event. Interestingly enough, Lakehurst is the same place where the old zeppelins and airships would land, including the Hindenburg. As a matter of fact, Cubarama took place in an old airship hangar. Pretty neat. With the limited time, we hurried through eight of the activities so that the kids could earn a Cubarama pin. We learned about flight, airplanes, gyroscopes, the history of Lakehurst and airships, and even saw a mock aircraft carrier flight deck. The kids even got to use Microsoft Flight Simulator to fly a plane.
We finished up a little after 4 PM, and we were all pretty hungry at this point. We had missed lunch, after all. We ran to the car, drove to, and ate lunch at the nearby McDonald’s around 4:30 PM. We were eating a very late lunch, but senior citizens started showing to eat their “early bird” dinners. Well, whatever.
While we ate our late lunches, we bought tickets to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier at the AMC Hamilton. Much driving later, we made it to the movie theater. Long day, but a nice reward too.
