Kafene and I went to the USS Iowa today in San Pedro harbor. Yes, the USS Iowa that we (LA) stole from you hippies up in No CalAnyways, it was quite an amazing experience to see what I've only read about in books and on tv/video. It is truly awesome to see how it is constructed and how they modernized it with new weaponry to keep it state of the art in terms of offensive and defensive weapons. It was pretty interesting to see too on the inside that the height of the beams was about 6 feet. Mark and I had no need to walk crouched or duck at all
The guns are amazing to stand next to. I can't imagine being on the receiving end of those 16" shells. The smaller anti-aircraft guns were neat to see as well. They upgraded the battleship with CIWS, aka R2D2 or Phalanx gatling guns to shoot down sea skimming missiles. At the end of the ship were replicas of the Tomahawk cruise missile boxes (4 per).
I've uploaded most of the pics onto my Flickr page here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sizzler...7632064380496/
It's definitely worth going. Tix is $18 + $1.00/hr for parking. If you live in So Cal and have been to the Intrepid museum down in San Diego, you must come up to San Pedro and visit the USS Iowa.