Despite being a programmer, I love reading military history books and visiting museums. Time to plan a visit to New Orleans. Riding in a real PT boat would be a blast. Much more likely than my dream of driving Tiger 131 (the one in Bovington used in movie Fury).
Make sure to give yourself plenty of time to go through the WWII Museum there. It is huge and extremely well put together, with tons of artifacts (including entire airplanes) and some of the best exhibit design I've ever seen.
130,000 volunteer hours and $6 million to restore a PT boat? Someone had one for sale for $750,000 on eBay in 2004, and they weren't getting any bids. The going price for an 80 foot yacht is about $1-2 million.
This reminds me a great deal of a nautical version of the people who are maintaining "flying museum" operable B-17, B-24 and other WW2 vintage bomber aircraft.
What I find interesting about these restoration efforts is that it took far less time to just build the thing from scratch, many decades ago (when technology was not as advanced).
