The USS KIDD

The USS KIDD is a massive fully functioning battleship that has been retired as a monument to the men and women who lost their lives during World War Two. The ship has been completely refurnished so that it looks like it has just come out of the shipyard. It’s currently floating just off the shore at Baton Rouge in Louisiana and we were reading about it in the paper while we were in Georgia. We really wanted to go see it and we decided we would take our Ford F-150 we got from Avis and head out that direction directly from our rented cabin.

So off we went speeding to Louisiana, my wife had camera in hand and it took us about two days to make the trip, we constantly stopped at restaurants and small attractions on the way, we figured we were in no rush and we just wanted to relax. When we arrived in Baton Rouge we got the opportunity to watch the USS KIDD sail into port. The ship is massive, absolutely huge, and the scary thing is that it was a smaller ship in the fleet.

Now the USS KIDD is a memorial to the soldiers, so there is a large stone wall in the city that holds all the names of Naval personnel lost during the wars. We decided to first visit the wall, and my wife wanted to find a few names of people she had heard about. We found one of the four she was looking for, and then headed to the docked USS KIDD.

You can purchase tours on this huge ship and so we purchased a guided tour. They take you across the deck and show you the guns, even empty shells that make you gawk at the size of the ammunition the guns fire. Heck, I don’t think I could have even lifted the thing. They take you below deck and you get to see all the rooms as well as the bridge, I mean this ship is huge. The narrow spaces and small quarters for the ships crew are kind of claustrophobic but we didn’t mind it to much.

If you get an opportunity to see the USS KIDD or if you’re in the Louisiana area it is definitely worth the drive. We loved every moment of it and we learned an abundance of information about the Navy and how a battleship functions, it was just astounding.