While we were out today, we saw this beast sailing through the sky:

Moose immediately called it an “R2-D2 ship,” which is pretty much what it looks like from a distance–R2-D2 tipped on his side. We discovered that the children had never seen a blimp before, and after reading about in the newspaper this afternoon, I discovered that they actually still haven’t!

What we saw was actually a Farmers Insurance Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik airship. Now, if you’re anything like me, you’ve heard of zeppelins as different things from blimps, but you might not actually know what makes them different. Fortunately, the newspaper article also cleared that up for me:

“A blimp is a big non-rigid bag of gas. A Zeppelin is a rigid inner structure covered with a space-age laminate — filled with gas.”

Now I can say I’ve learned something today, so obviously the day wasn’t a waste! I also learned that Goodyear is no longer go to be using blimps for their advertising, but will also be switching over to Zeppelins. I don’t know…the Goodyear Zeppelin just doesn’t have the same ring as the Goodyear Blimp.