Houston: Space Center

James decided the best thing to do on the last day of pre-school was to take off on a fun weekend trip. He decided Wednesday night and we left on Thursday after "graduation" and work. He booked a hotel and planned the itinerary, so I just did what I had time to do and then got in the car. It worked out pretty well to take a trip with me just going with the flow!  Maybe all our trips should work like that.

The first stop on our whirlwind visit to Houston was the Space Center. Zack has always been keen on the moon and astronauts so we've been wanting to take him to the Space Center for a while. James remembers this as a great place he visited as a kid. At that time, the visitor area was in the same campus as NASA's working area. Now it has been split into a separate campus but there is a tram that takes you (after additional security scans) through some key locations in the NASA area. The boys considered it at "train" rather than a "tram" and we went with it because that was exciting for them.  As we went through the artifacts, I was most impressed with the size of the Saturn V rocket that sent Apollo 11 to the moon (that's it in the bottom two pictures). It was gigantic!  There were also lunar rovers, moon rocks (which we all got to touch) and many other cool things. The one thing I didn't like was the placement of the very cool play structure. It was the first thing you saw when you came in the door, so of course the boys wanted to do that and didn't really want to see the rest of the exhibits. We did drag them away to look at actually cool stuff, but then they wanted to go back. We did go back, and yes, it was a fun playscape. How about putting that at the back, museum planners?