Stratford Touch-a-Truck

One of the fun activities that Renee planned was a touch-a-truck event on Saturday.  A touch-a-truck is a gathering of cool special purpose vehicles from local companies and organizations.  These organizations completely detail and clean their vehicles and drive them to the site, usually a cordoned off parking lot.  They then open of the vehicles to children large and small to crawl inside and out, usually for a small ($3-$4) entry fee.

Typical participants are the local fire, EMT and police departments, construction companies and towing companies.

On a regular day my son begs us to open up our boring cars so that he can stand behind the wheel and pretend to drive.  He was in heaven.

Additionally, this touch-a-truck was in Stratford, Conn., and had something that was fairly unique.   Stratford is home to Sikorski Helicopter's global HQ, and also one of their factories.  That factory is the manufacturing home of the Blackhawk Helicoper, star of the 2001 movie, Blackhawk Down, a personal favorite.  One of them was there.

(All images can be clicked to see a larger size.)

This particular helicopter was straight from the factory, with a total of 11 hours of total flying time.  It definitely had that new Car helicopter smell.

According to the pilot who was standing by, its current configuration was completely unarmed and unarmored; it is sent to another assembly plant elsewhere to be configured for whatever service assignment it will have.  In that configuration it is worth about $12MM.  Once equipped with all the necessary weapon systems, an in-service Blackhawk is worth $16MM.

According to Renee I was the only adult who took my own turn in the seat after the kids (or before, who remembers) but she's pretty sure I wasn't the only who wanted to.

Back a few days when I was trying to remember what I enjoy doing?  Well, being the biggest kid at the touch-a-truck?  Sounds good to me.