A 1954 Yellowstone Travel Trailer - with two doors

So I was intrigued when I saw a story about the 26-foot 1958 Airstream Overlander trailer being gutted and re-modeled by a group of students at Washington State University in Spokane.

They’ve been working on it all summer and, according to a university report, “Part of the focus of the project is to explore the sustainability issues of today’s society and challenge the current image of the travel trailer industry.”

They’ve gutted the inside, but luckily they’re committed to preserving the trailer’s historic exterior character.

Here’s a short video on their progress:

And here’s the part I’m especially excited about: this fall, when the Airstream is all shiny and renovated,  the students will be taking the trailer on the road to show off their handiwork.  (And party?) After that, the updated WSU Airstream trailer will be either given away in a contest or sold. To find out what happens, follow them on Facebook or Twitter.

And for inspiration, here are few photos from the collection of the RV Museum and Hall of Fame:

Mae West's 1931 Chevrolet trailer

1936 Airstream Clipper

(Vintage RV photos courtesy RV Museum and Hall of Fame)

Today, to mark the anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death on August 16^th, 1977, we’ll make a stop at Graceland, where two of Elvis’s jets are on display.

This Lockheed JetStar was dubbed Hound Dog II:

Hound Dog II, Elvis Presley's Lockheed JetStar

(Photo courtesy jbcurio, via Flickr).

According to this article, Elvis purchased this  Lockheed JetStar in September, 1975 for $899,702, while waiting for his other plane, the Lisa Marie (below), a Convair 880 Jet previously owned by Delta Airlines, to arrive.

At Graceland, visitors sit in a mock 1970′s-era airline terminal to see a short film about Elvis and his airplanes and are then allowed to tour the JetStar and the Lisa Marie, which was also known as Hound Dog I or Flying Graceland.

Elvis Presley's airplane - the Lisa Marie - at Graceland

(Photo courtesy rgblasson via Flickr

Sadly, I haven’t had the pleasure of visiting Graceland. Yet. But when I do, I’ll make a beeline for the airplanes. First stop, the Lisa Marie. According to this article, the airplane has a seating area, conference room, library and plush bedroom with an executive bathroom equipped with gold washbasin and faucets.

Have you seen Elvis’s airplanes at Graceland? Share details of your visit below.

And please let us know if you have a nomination for an aviation or space museum you’d like to see featured on a future edition of Museum Monday here at StuckatTheAirport.com.

A favorite: Elvis and Nixon

That same shop is where you’ll find one of this week’s Souvenir Sunday picks: socks decorated with an Amish horse and buggy scene.

Novelty socks for sale at MDT Airport

I’m sure there’s a shop or two over at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport that stocks novelty socks as well. (Moose anklets, anyone?)  And it’s a good bet there’s a coupon in the airport’s summer coupon book that can be used towards that purchase.

Don’t need any socks? It’s still a good idea to download the coupon book from the MSP website or pick up a copy at an information booth inside the airport. There are dozens of two-for-one and free-with-order drink and meal deals in there, along with discounts and gift-with-purchase deals in many airport stores.

You should also pick up the MSP summer coupon book if you’re a pet owner. MSP has a 24-hour pet boarding facility – it’s called Now Boarding – on airport property and there’s a coupon in the booklet good for a free bath or nail trim for pets staying overnight.  That seems like a great airport souvenir for pets – and their people.

Did you find a great souvenir last time you were stuck at the airport? If it’s under $10, “of” the city or region and, ideally, a bit offbeat, please snap a photo and send it along. Your souvenir may be featured on a future edition of Souvenir Sunday on StuckatTheAirport.com.

Last week, just in time for the busy 4^th of July holiday travel weekend, PHL announced that the airport-wide Wi-Fi service would now be free.

Now that’s fun!

This week? Well, there’s not much that can match free Wi-Fi for excitement, but on Wednesday there will a CPR/AED (Automatic external defibrillator) workshop.  And on Thursday and Friday – live music.

For times and locations, see the PHL website.

What’s next? Throughout the summer, travelers are promised art demonstrations, pep rallies with local pro sports teams and team mascots and, our favorite, free stuff.

Last week, the airport also unveiled a new art exhibit honoring the Liberty Bell.

(Philadelphia Mayor Nutter was at PHL for the exhibit opening)

Picturing Liberty: Philadelphia’s Legendary Bell includes 50 black and white photographs about the history and legacy of this iconic American item. The exhibit is in Terminal A-East, post-security through June 2011.

(Hanging planes at Pima Air & Space Museum, Tucson, AZ)

I am an idiot.

At least that’s what some fans of Dayton, Ohio’s United States Air Force Museum and many other aviation museums were calling me today.

They read my msnbc.com column – Aviation and space museums that soar - and were pissed that their favorite museum wasn’t among the six museums featured in the story.

I’m not surprised. The museums I included in the story are great. But there are around 600 other aviation and space museums around the country and each has its own unique collection and incredible team of supporters and volunteers.  So it was a good bet that a lot of people were going to be disappointed with the short list in my story.

(Northrop B-2 Spirit on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force: U.S. Air Force photo)

What did I miss?

The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio for sure.  According to Bobby Schlein, a self-described aviation enthusiast “with a degree and a job in the field,” the museum has“the most extensive collection of defense aircraft… from a replica of the Wright flyer to the F-22 and most in between; as well as a presidential and experiential hangar with many iterations of Air Force One and several very rare (some one of a kind) experimental vehicles including the X-70B Valkyrie.” Another huge plus …no admission fee.

What else?  The Air Zoo in Kalamazoo, MI, the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL, the Experimental Aircraft Association’s AirVenture Museum in Oshkosh, WI, and Kennedy Space Center in Florida were just some of the other “must-see” places people wished were on the list as well.

They are all certainly worth a visit. And in this day and age, when so many art and history organizations are hurting for money and support, they’re all lucky to have such devoted fans.

So apologies if I overlooked your favorite aviation or space museum on this list of six:

FUTURE OF FLIGHT AVIATION CENTER & BOEING TOUR
Everett, Wash.

What you’ll see: On Boeing’s 90-minute tour through the Everett factory, visitors go inside the world’s largest building (by volume) and see the production line for the 747, 767, 777 and the new 787 airplanes. The adjacent Future of Flight Aviation Center displays airplane engines and other giant airplane parts and offers a wide variety of interactive exhibits, including the knob and dial-encrusted flight deck from a 727 airplane.

EVERGREEN AVIATION & SPACE MUSEUM
McMinnville, Ore.

What you’ll see: The museum houses the infamous, huge Howard Hughes Flying Boat HK-1, better known as the Spruce Goose, and more than 50 aircraft from various eras, including a Wright 1903 Flyer replica, a Russian Photon space capsule and a Lockheed SR-71A Blackbird.

(Fighter jets outside the hangar dedicated to World War II Aircraft at the Pima Air & Space Museum; Courtesy Arizona Aerospace Foundation)

PIMA AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM
Tucson, Ariz.

What you’ll see: The collection at this 80-acre museum includes more than 300 aircraft and spacecraft, 125,000 aviation-related artifacts, a relocated WWII barracks and a space gallery with a moon rock and a training version of an Apollo space capsule. The museum also displays President John F. Kennedy’s Air Force One, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress, and hundreds of other rare, important and restored aircraft.

INTREPID SEA, AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM
New York

What you’ll see: Located on and in the 900-foot-long ESSEX class aircraft carrier Intrepid, the museum is itself a national historical landmark with a collection that includes a Concorde as well as aircraft from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine and Coast Guard. The submarine USS Growler, the only submarine still in existence that fired nuclear missiles is also part of the museum and is open to the public.

SAN DIEGO AIR & SPACE MUSEUM
San Diego, Calif.

What you’ll see: Housed in a 1930s-era Ford Motor Company Exposition building, the museum presents science, aviation and space history in a series of themed airplane, spacecraft and artifact-filled galleries that include a 1928 Ford Tri-Motor passenger plane, a working flying replica of Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, the Apollo 9 command module and many other one-of-a-kind private, military and commercial artifacts and aircraft.

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION’S NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM

What you’ll see: The world’s largest collection of historic air and spacecraft includes a planetarium, an IMAX theater and thousands of artifacts, including the original Wright 1903 Flyer, Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, the Apollo 11 command module Columbia from the first lunar landing mission, and a moon rock that you’re allowed to touch. And that’s just at the building on the National Mall. The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, located near Dulles International Airport, contains many of the museum’s largest objects and artifacts, including the Space Shuttle Enterprise, a deHavilland Chipmunk aerobatic plane and the Boeing B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay.

Have I missed your favorite aviation or space museum? Please share the details in the comments section below.

From June 11 – 14, 2010 Borders will be donating 10% of its weekend sales (up to $50,000) to Gulf Coast relief efforts through the non-profit Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana (CRCL).  So if you’re going to pick up some reading material for your flight, keep this in mind. (The offer is good at all Borders, Waldenbooks and Borders Express outlets, but some chains specifically exempt airport locations from special promotions, so I checked to make sure.)

Borders will also work with CRCL to recruit volunteers and host info sessions in some Borders stores.

And if you’ve been thinking that you want to fly down to the Gulf Coast to help pick up oil or wash oil-soaked birds, hold on a bit.  As I learned while researching this article for msnbc.com, Volunteers needed…just not quite yet, CRCL and pretty much every other volunteer and environmental organization is asking everyone to register their interest and availability, but to sit tight for a few weeks until they can figure out what exactly it is that volunteers from out of town can do.

Here’s an excerpt from my story:

Local, regional and national conservation and environmental organizations are also being inundated with offers of help.  While these groups anticipate that volunteers will soon be needed for everything from shoreline clean-up to Web site management, groups are currently asking that volunteers simply register their interest. “We will contact registered volunteers when an appropriate opportunity is available for you to assist,” reads a message on LA Gulf Response, a consortium Web site made up of the Nature Conservancy, the National Wildlife Federation, The Audubon Society, the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, and the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program.

“Good idea,” said David Clemmons of VolunTourism.org. “There’s this desire to go help right away. But if you’re not a professional and not prepared for the conditions you might encounter, it may actually be better to stay away for a while.”

Clemmons interviewed researchers and tourism professionals about the role voluntourists played after events such as the tsunami in Southeast Asia, Hurricane Katrina, and the earthquake in China. “Let the professionals go in first to assess needs and set up systems,” he concludes. “Voluntourism shouldn’t start until at least six months after any natural or man-made disaster.”

That gives you time to mark your calendar, register with a volunteer agency and get trained locally before you head for the Gulf.

If you’re going to get stuck at a German airport, try to make it Düsseldorf International Airport (DUS) on the first Sunday of the month.

That’s when DUS has is its “Airlebnis” (air-experience) events and if you were there yesterday, Sunday, June 6, 2010, you would have seen athletes and visitors literally bouncing off the walls – and everything else  – as DUS became the obstacle course for the  German Parkour Championship.

What’s Parkour?  Take a look at this:

There area oodles of other parkour (freerunning) videos on the web, but you get the picture… this is a really zany, potentially dangerous, but really fun-looking sport. But what kind of sport exactly?

According to Parkour US:

“Parkour or l’art du déplacement is NOT an extreme sport, rather it is a physical discipline that allow one to overcome their obstacles to get from point a to point b in the most efficient using the possibility of human body. Such movement may contain running, jumping, climbing, vaulting and other movements that may help the efficiency.”

At DUS, Parkour competitors – traceurs – were tested in two categories: speed and style, including “execution, flow, creativity, level of difficulty, and overall showmanship” and participants included the current world champion, a 15-year old from Germany.

The men and women who perform parkour make it look easy. So for novices who wanted to give it a try, there were professional instructors on hand to give lessons.

I’m waiting for the results of the championship and some photos from the day, so please be sure to check back. But in the meantime, I’m heading outside to practice.

For my At the Airport column in USATODAY.com this month I offered a fun round-up of items being recycled by airports and airlines in an effort to be help save the earth and, in some cases, to save some serious money.

You can read the full column, For airports and airlines, creative recyling  brings cost savings, on the USA TODAY website but  briefly, the list I included ranges from airports that recycle, reuse or re-purpose everything from old metal detectors, used de-icing fluid and concrete from old runways to creative partnerships between airports or airlines and local non-profits and green businesses. 

Two examples:

Jacksonville International Airport is working with the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens on a project to turn tree clippings into food. The zoo needs a reliable year-round source of fresh “browse,” the natural vegetation eaten by many of the zoo’s large mammals. The grounds around the airport are full of browse-worthy trees and shrubs that could do with some regular clipping.  So browse harvested at the airport in the morning now becomes dinner for giraffe, elephants and great apes at the zoo;

And old seat covers from Delta and re-branded Northwest airplanes that could have ended up in a landfill somewhere were instead donated to Tierra Ideas, a small North Carolina company that is recycling the bags as messenger bags, laptop cases and other travel accessories with patterns that will very familiar to frequent fliers on those airlines.

A Delta spokesperson says so far Delta has donated about 5,873 pounds of fabric from an estimated 20,000 seat covers. “…Enough fabric to cover 92 of Delta’s 767-300ER aircraft.”

And – here’s something that didn’t fit in the column: On May 17th, Purdue University Airport, in West Lafayette, IN will be recyling this 737 aircraft.

“Shredding it,” is the term Betty Stansbury of Purdue University uses:

The aircraft is a 41 year old Boeing 737-200 donated to the University by United Airlines fifteen years ago for research and training purposes in Purdue’s  Aviation Technology Program. 

“The plane has reached the end of its useful life, and will be shredded starting on Monday May 17th. ….We use a large cutting device, called a shearer, to chew the plane into smaller pieces, which are placed in metal containers for transportation, melting and recycling.”

And these three-legged chonchitos, which hail from from the village of Pomaire, Chile. They are supposed to bring good luck and are traditionally given to friends as a token of goodwill and love, but since they’re only $5.99 a piece, I’d probably buy a few for my friends and make sure to keep one for myself.

Have you had the good fortune to find a great souvenir while you were stuck at the airport? If so, please take a photo and send it along. It may end up featured on a future edition of Souvenir Sunday.

Case in point: the Oakland International Airport (OAK) site, which has a link to the Exploratorium’s instructions on how to fold a paper airplane, information about the Oakland Aviation Museum, which sits on the airport’s North Field,

and a great historical video about the history of the airport and its connections to Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart and other aviation pioneers.

You can watch the entire 20-minute video, or see bite-size segments of the film on the OAK website.