Charleston : Yorktown Aircraft Carrier

We could see the USS Yorktown aircraft carrier from the harbor, next to the aquarium, so we decided that our next stop would be the Patriots Point Naval and Maritime Museum, which was awesome. The USS Yorktown (CV-10) was commissioned in 1943 and renamed in honor of the original Yorktown (CV-5), which sank during the Battle of Midway.

It was uncharacteristically cold in Charleston during the last week of October and it was extremely windy.

It was particularly windy on the flight deck. The deck had quite a few planes from various eras.
They have a submarine, the USS Clamagore, which can also be toured.
You can visit a destroyer and a Coast Guard cutter, the USCG Ingham. An entire day could be spent exploring everything.

We didn't even have time to really look at the planes on display in the hanger deck. There are plenty of things to read about each plane and various locations on the ship, so it would have been nice to spend more time reading about the planes and the air craft carrier itself. Looking around and taking lots of pictures was a lot of fun, though.

From an accessibility standpoint, it was great. On the flight deck, the wind was blowing so hard, I didn't even have to push myself in one direction. The Yorktown had elevators, so it was completely accessible. The submarine, the destroyer and the cutter are not similarly accessible, but they are pretty nifty to look at from a distance.