Houston Vacation: Day Three

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Originally uploaded by Phisch

Photos here.

Short this time. By now, we are all pretty tired---sleeping in strange beds, though comfortable, still doesn't give you the right amount of sleep---but the boys are troupers so they are excited.

We had another great bagel breakfast at Einstein Bros. I tell you, I want a Southern someone to adopt me. Yesterday, the manager happily offered to pour us some whole milk for NM then didn't complain (or charge us) when we switched to lemonade. Today, she let us have a lemonade after NM dropped the first and wouldn't let us pay. I sure didn't mind being called honey or sweetie by her, she meant it!

NASA was great fun and the boys again had a good time. A lot of it was over J's head but so long as he got to do the tram tour and the interactive exhibits, he was fine. Since there was a shuttle launch at Cape Canaveral, we missed the part of the tour where they take you into mission control, more commonly known as the Houston of "Houston, we have a problem." As our tour guide liked to say, "We're like Oz, the guys behind the curtain" of every launch and landing that NASA does. We did get to tour the facility that houses the scale model of the International Space Station plus their tools and equipment used for astronaut training.

We also got to see the only Saturn V rocket around. The mission it was meant for, Apollo 18 was scrapped and it was donated to the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian lent it back and assisted NASA in building a facility to house it. NASA just left it out in the open and it was deteriorating from all the exposure. It's laying on its side, which is good since it would be easier to build a warehouse 300+ ft. wide vs. tall, don't you think? The thing is massive and impressive in its size, though. And the vast majority of it is for its propulsion systems. I guess it just takes that much to get you 25k mph so you can escape Earth's atmosphere.

After the tram tour, the boys did the exhibits. I skipped some like sitting in a scale model of the module that the astronauts came home in, for instance. Claustrophobia pretty much nixes any desire for me to become an astronaut. Imagine days in a closet? I can't. Movies like Apollo 13 are horror films to me! They boys didn't mind in the least! Good for them. They enjoyed all of that stuff. They really enjoyed the really tall playscape as well. J only got lost from his brother once but he didn't really remember that as much as all the fun he had. The science exhibits were all so hands-on that the boys both got something out of them.

We had lunch and since my shrimp bisque (I can still eat shrimp!) was so hot it took me a while, hubby took the boys to see the space shuttle scale model. They both got to sit in it and take photos. There's an amazing number of buttons in the cockpit of that thing.

We left early afternoon for home so we could avoid traffic and have some time left over for hubby to relax since he had to work the next day. That turned out to be a good plan since we were all so tired. It was so nice to sleep in our own beds, the boys were even talking about it on the way home.

What a blessing it was to get to spend three days together doing so much fun stuff. We'll have to plan another trip down there since there was so much left to see that we didn't really get to do.