Houston, Texas

On Tuesday we arrived in Houston, Texas. One of our first impressions of Texas was traffic jams because we sat in one for about an hour waiting for road work....it was a good thing we had a bathroom and food at our disposal. We spent our first day in Houston catching up on some school and then today we headed to Johnson Space Center. It was very interesting and educational. We watched movies of all the past Apollo and Gemini rockets. There were old lunar modules to look into and also moon rocks to touch. There was a display on the life of an astronaut while in the space station, eating, sleeping and hygiene (special toilets that suck if you were wondering). The kids enjoyed the Martian Matrix which was essentially a huge playplace. We also took a tram to Mission Control and also into the building with all the simulators (Space Station, Shuttles and CanadaArm) which the astronauts train in. Our last stop on the tram was seeing the actual Apollo 17 rocket which was the last Apollo built before the program was scrubbed in the 70's. The rocket was huge. 9/10ths of the rocket was just fuel, with the lunar module stuck onto the top looking very tiny for 3 people. This was the last Apollo rocket completely built but never used.
Tomorrow the kids will eat astronaut food that I couldn't resist buying. Freeze dried ice cream....Yum.