Fort Gordon museum - Day 1502 (Year 5, Day 42)

Augusta, GA

This actually happened last week, on Wednesday, 8/1 but I haven't had a chance to write about it until now.

I had mentioned before that Mitch was working a map at the Fort Gordon army base, which is the headquarters of the Signal Corp. and cyber security (with NSA offices as well). 

         

While there, he had discovered the signal corp. museum on the premises and wanted to visit there with me.  We had to wait for a rain date so he would have paid time off (they're not open on the weekend).  Wednesday was finally the first day in a long time that we had rain that lasted more than a few minutes in the afternoon, so he came to pick me up (the base is only about 4.5 miles from the campground).

Neither of us realized that any and everyone entering the base needs to go the visitor center first and requires a photo to be taken and a background check to be done, whether it was a person picking someone up, or folks like us just visiting the museum.  It took us about an hour to get that completed!  I complained that I hoped the museum was worth it (and yes, it was).

Below is a picture describing the purpose of the museum as well as the scene when you first enter.  It is also used for training purposes and as we were about to leave, a group of about 50 new recruits came into the building or a brief orientation and the requirement to visit all the exhibits and learn as much as possible about the history of the signal corp.

I really wasn't that much aware of this branch of the military and found it rather fascinating.  It actually started out during the Indian Wars, and being long before technology, they used different colored flags waved in different directions as their signals.  Much later (during WWI and II), better signaling equipment was invented, as was Morse Code.