USS Abraham Lincoln

We spent a lot of time yesterday morning visiting the USS Abraham Lincoln which is docked in Los Angeles for Navy Week. As always, I planned to get there early to beat the crowd. Unfortunately, a couple of thousand other people had the same idea.

We arrived at the World Cruise Center, the shuttle point for the carrier, at 9:30 am. Tours were to start at 10 but there were already long lines of people ahead of us. We ended up waiting about 1 hour 45 minutes in line before boarding a shuttle bus. There was another brief wait at shipside to go through security, so it was about 2 hours from the time we parked until we could board the ship.

The people who came after us, and they came by the thousands, probably had a 3-4 hour wait.  The lines were huge as you can see in the video below.

You entered via a gangway into the Hanger Deck where they had various displays and merchandise opportunities. Then a high speed elevator took us all up to the Flight deck where there were several aircraft on display along with pilots and crews to talk about their craft.

One of the reasons I wanted to go on this ship was this event in 2003 which took place on this same ship:

I decided to have my photo taken near the same spot, but without the big sign.

Both my wife and son went with me, and the last time I had my photo taken on a carrier with him was in 2005 when he looked a little different:

Today he's a little taller:

I put the rest of the photos, plus some video of our elevator rides, in this video:


The carrier is closed today for tours but will open again Saturday and Sunday. If you're thinking of going, you really need to get there by 8am to have a reasonable chance of getting on an earlier tour. It will be a madhouse this weekend, and with hot, humid weather expected, standing in hours-long lines will not be much fun.

It's a great experience, though, to get to walk down the flight line of an active duty nuclear aircraft carrier. I highly recommend it.