In honor of Gary Hilton's triumphant delivery of a Lodestar fuselage from Texarkana, TX all the way to Montana, I decided to have a small Lodestar moving ceremony. This poor Lodestar has had it pretty rough. It was submerged with salt water when Hurricane Ike pounded Galveston, Texas several years ago. The plane then ended up in a junk yard on Galveston Island. What the salt water didn't destroy, the Galveston Fire Department did when they used it to practice on with their cut-off saws. At some point in time, I lost my mind and decided that it would be a good idea to save it from the wrath of the fire department. I slid my 29 foot trailer under it, zipped off the wings Gary Hilton style and drove it away from the mean fire department bullies. The fuselage is in extremely poor shape but I can't leave a man behind so over the bridge back to the mainland we went with the relic of a Lodestar. The tail stuck out past the rear of my trailer only 16 feet, but the good news was that we were only 4ft over the legal total length limit. It was dark before we got off of the island and all of my trailer lights shorted out. The trailer brakes went out and the trailer license plate fell off . We past a ton of Texas D.P.S. cars along the way and we did so with no Imperial entanglements. Good times.
