Day 4: Aeroscopia

Our flight home on Monday wasn't until 5pm, which meant we had almost another full day to spend in France. We decided to do something different with this day and visit a museum called Aeroscopia, which is not far from the airport in Toulouse. Toulouse is famous as the centre of the aerospace industry in Europe, being home to the headquarters of aircraft manufacturer Airbus, and Aeroscopia is a large aviation museum.

For what must be one of Toulouse's major attractions, it was surprisingly hard to get to. First of all we had to catch a metro a few stops out of the city centre. Then we had to switch to a tram, which took us on a rather slow journey through the various suburbs of the city. We had hoped the same tram was going to take us all the way to Aeroscopia, but it unexpectedly terminated at a tram junction, where we had to get off and wait for a second tram to take us the final few stops. Once we got off that tram, we had a short walk and then we saw the museum appearing in the distance.

We had our first exciting aviation experience before we even made it to the museum, when Matt pointed out a Beluga taking off from the nearby airport. Belugas are giant cargo planes, used to carry huge things like aircraft wings from one factory (where they might be built) to another factory (where they might be added to the body of the plane). They are so-called because they look like a beluga whale  

As we approached the museum, we were slightly concerned that that might actually be our only aviation experience of the day, because it looked like the place was deserted. There was a risk that a museum might indeed be closed on a Monday, but luckily that turned out not to be the case; I think a Monday in March was just not a very popular date to visit! Soon we were inside and admiring this Lego model of an A380, which had taken over 300 hours to build.

Once we'd bought tickets we were able to enter the main museum space and admire the aircraft on display. These ranged from the very old...

...to the much more modern.

One of the first things we saw was this enormous plane called a Super Guppy.

This is a huge cargo plane, older than the Beluga which we'd seen taking off earlier, which was once used by NASA to transport rocket parts. The front of the plane opens up like this so that big items can be loaded inside.

One of the most exciting exhibits was this Concorde.

This one was a prototype which was used for testing and experiments.

It had a very pointy nose...

...and a very narrow aisle inside.

The other thing I was quit excited about seeing was this replica of a Star Wars X-Wing, complete with R2D2 in the cockpit  

It was made from over 1.5m Lego bricks and took 1,750 hours to build.

Once we'd finished exploring inside, we were able to go outside and see a few more aircraft. The most impressive by far was this A380, an absolutely enormous double-decker plane.

It's hard to convey in photos just how huge it was! We were able to go inside and explore the interior too, though I forgot to take any photos of that. I think we just added flying on a double-decker plane to our bucket list though

Once we'd seen everything there was to see at the museum, it was time for us to travel to the airport. We really weren't very far away from the airport geographically - only a few kilometres - but it didn't look like it would be an easy walk, so the plan was to use public transport. That turned out to be slightly harder than I expected; we had to retrace our steps several stops on the tram to the junction where we'd changed trams this morning, then wait quite a while for an infrequent bus to take us the final five minutes or so to the airport. But we made it and before too long we were in the air, with a great view back down towards the museum as we took off.

The meal on the plane back was chicken salad, which was a bit too healthy for me. The tiramisu was good, though!

The flight was a fairly short 90 minutes and before long we were flying over central London, on our way to Heathrow. The UK felt rather cold and grey compared to the south of France! It was a great trip though, and definitely feels like we were away for longer than four days