Wednesday, May 23 and coming home

This was our last day of sight-seeing in Houston. It was raining again in the morning, and we knew that if it was raining, we wouldn't get to take a tram tour of NASA, but it was our last day so we went anyway! Luckily, it did stop raining about 9 that morning, and we were able to take our tour. It is pretty neat - they take you on a tour through the campus, and you get to stop and get off and go inside two different buildings.

 

This is a picture of the kids in the entryway of the NASA space center visitors' center. It has a big display about the Mars rover. 

 This is a picture of one of the stops on the tour. It's a building with a mock-up of the space station where they do some training. Kind of cool! The other building on the stop is historic mission control (think Apollo 13). That was pretty neat, too. It's so amazing how far the technology has come in 50 years.

The last stop on the tour they call Rocket Park. It has old rockets you can tour. The big building holds the Saturn V rocket (that took all the Apollo's up). It was so gigantic! This last picture is Brian and the kids standing in front of the bottom part. The picture doesn't really do justice to the size. Anyway, it was a cool bit of history to see.

 

The rest of NASA is just hand on learning mostly for kids. It was a little disappointing to Brian and I because they were making it sound a little like propaganda for NASA's future of manned space flight and really, there's isn't much of a future for that anymore. Some of the historical stuff was cool, though. We got to tour a mock-up of the old Skylab space station and we saw lots of memorabilia from space and astronauts. Overall, a cool place.

 

Our evening consisted of ordering pizza to eat at the hotel. We were going to let the kids swim that evening, but the pool was closed due to some sort of bugs. The kids were sooo disappointed. So, we went back to our room and the boys and Brian played a game of Pokémon. Grace and I shopped at a close-by mall for a while then we packed up, ready to hit the road the next day.

 

The next day, Thursday, we headed for home. We drove as far as Wichita. It took quite a while, about 10 hours, since we hit a huge traffic jam in Oklahoma City. The kids were pretty antsy when we got there. We let them swim then sent them to bed around 10. Luckily, we only had a 4 hour drive the next day to home. We got back around 1 and poor Grace had to go downtown to the Lied for her dance recital rehearsal. No rest for the weary, I guess. A fun vacation - a good time had by all. Probably our last big vacation for a while, since we're heading to Disney next fall with the Niebuhr family.