Ok, before I get going on our Rocket City Adventure, I realize that I never uploaded a Christmas 2011 picture or blog post. Since it’s now closer to Easter than Christmas, I figured I’d just upload this collage and you can all just imagine how much fun we had this Christmas.
Ok, now that you’ve had a chance to oohh and aahh over how cute (and big) Tyler and Reagan are, we can move on to the more recent story. So, I had to travel to Huntsville, Alabama for work a couple weeks ago. Since my meetings didn’t start until Wednesday, however, we decided to drive down as a family and spend a day or two site seeing. For those of you reading this who have never been to Huntsville, Alabama you may not know that Huntsville is the home of the Space and Rocket Center and is often referred to as Rocket City. When you think about NASA and the manned space programs, most people think about Houston and Cape Canaveral. Huntsville, however, has played as much of a role in the actual development of the rockets and other supporting programs. Let’s face it, you don’t get to have two full-size replicas of the Saturn V rocket, the Mercury rocket, and the Space Shuttle just because your town thought it would be a nice tourist attraction.
So we introduced the kids to the world of space, rockets, exploration, and science associated with the manned space programs. It was a blast – literally. We watched a movie about the Hubble telescope in the IMAX theater and the part where the space shuttle lifted off seemed to shake the whole building. Tyler was kind of scared at first, but afterwards that was all he could talk about (Reagan just slept through it – yeah, she takes after me and can sleep through anything). Then, by some strange coincidence there were episodes about space on all of Tyler’s shows - Sid the Science Kid, Phineas & Ferb, and the Discovery Channel (ok, I guess that’s my show, but still). So now our Equinox is “The Space Shuttle Truck” and we “blast off” to go to Earth whenever we go somewhere.
Here are a few pictures of our exciting adventures in Huntsville.
As you can see in some of the pictures, they hold “Space Camp” here as well. When the kids are a little bit older, we’re totally going to try and send them. Cousins, start saving up and maybe the kids can go together.
Of course, we did have a couple unexpected events. The first surprise came a couple days into our trip. While we didn’t really feel too much difference in the humidity level, Reagan’s hair reminded us that we had definitely crossed into a whole new realm of crazy, humidity hair. Her usual curls morphed into a full-on afro. It was hilarious.
The other excitement came on our last day. As we were packing things up and getting ready for the drive home, we started to hear tornado sirens and the PBS show the kids were watching was suddenly interrupted with the whole “Beep…. Beep…. Beep…. This is a test. This is a test of the emergency broadcast system.” The only problem was that they decided to add one little word that really got our attention. The word? “Not” It’s amazing how quickly your attention shifts when you hear “This is NOT a test” come across the TV. Now, as many of you know, we had already survived the Great HurriQuake of 2011 (see the previous blog post HERE) but trying to out fox mother nature twice in one year seemed like pushing our luck. Thankfully the storm passed by about 30-45 minutes North of Huntsville. Then there was a pocket of calm that was about 2 to 3 hours across. We managed to stay right in that pocket as it moved north east right along our traveling route. It wasn’t until around 12:30 or 1:00 in the morning that it apparently finally blew past the hotel we stopped at for the night in the middle of Virginia. I say apparently because I managed to sleep right through it and Thesha had to tell me about it the next morning. Like I said, I take after Reagan and can sleep through anything.
