Jack Roush was in town yesterday to visit the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum located just outside of Hamilton in the small community of Mount Hope where the Hamilton International Airport is.

The main reason why Jack was visiting was to have a ride in one of only two flying Lancaster bombers in the world. 

Being an avid flyer himself, I'm sure Jack had an excellent ride.

The Hamilton Spectator, who I do freelance work for as a NASCAR scribe, sent one of their sports reporters to cover the event.

Even though I do work for the Spectator I don't know if I have privileges to re-print the story and 3 pictures here so I'll give you the link to it at thespec.com.

I wish I could have went to the event as I would have loved to meet Jack and I would have loved to have talked planes with him a bit as I love those old WW2 Warbirds and I sort of got a personal connection to the Lancaster.

When I was a kid I lived about 5 minutes away from he airport and sometimes on the weekend my Mom would take me up to the airport to see some of the planes and they always had this one hanger where they kept a bunch of old planes.  This was of course before they actually built the Warplane Heritage Museum and hanger.

When they airlifted the Lanc to the airport with a Chinook helicopter back in the late '70's we went to go see it.  The plane was worn out and it was pink in colour.  Some of the guys in the hanger let me climb in it and look around - that was cool.  Then they showed us some parts and stuff they had under tarps on skids; engines, glass, sheet metal, etc. and told us about what they were going to do to get it flight worthy again.  It was going to take a lot of time and money - and apparently some Jack Roush parts too.

At the next airshow they held they were collecting donations to help restore the plane and I gave them $20.00 of my own money, I was about 9 at the time and that was 20 weeks of allowance.  I donated money every year thereafter until they stopped having the airshows.

Yep, sure wish I could have been there.