Space Camp/Alabama/Georgia/Tennessee

 It has been a while since the last blog post. Am I right? Since most people in my family didn't see any of this trip, I will include some highlights below. 

Space Camp

After saving up money for two years, Kate and Kairi finally made it to Space Camp!!!! They were in Huntsville, Alabama for 6 days and 5 nights. Their days started at 6:30 am and ended at 9pm. There were a few low points like kids teasing them or only being called "the twins" when they wanted to be called by their names like everybody else. (Beware. This is a pet peeve of theirs along with people calling ky-ree "Carrie"). But they also had some good points like making a few new friends (Asha, Lauren, and Sydney) and meeting a Real Live Astronaut! 

They got to meet:  

Dr. Larry DeLucas American biochemist and former NASA astronaut.

 

 

They were super excited and said he was nice.  

On the day of drop off, it was hot and sunny. Only one person was able to take them up to the check-in so Chris got the honors. Wesley and I got to sit in the rental car (it was a Nissan Maxima with hot black leather seats) for a full hour waiting. 

 

First they went up the stairs and then found their room. 

They got to sleep on the right side near the middle hole of this space craft thingy dorm room.

Once the girls were dropped off, Chris came back to us and we walked Huntsville, Alabama for a little over two hours looking for 14 cement/metal ducks. By the time we found them all (we did not take the best route), we had about 14,000 steps for the day. Our legs were a little tired since we're not used to walking that long. We decided to call it a night and head back to the hotel. 

Some of these were a lot harder to find than others mostly because the clues to them did not lead you to where the duck actually was. They were located a good half a building away, or buried by overgrown bushes, or hidden on a rock face. But we found them all!!

Our first night at the hotel no one slept too well. Since Kate and Kairi were only going to be with us one night, we reserved a two bedroom room 2 months in advance. The hotel gave our room away because a large little-kid football team come through. So, we had one king size bed for five people. The three kids took the normal spots on the bed. Amanda slept sideways at their feet, and Chris didn't sleep on the chair. 

The next night was better. We were able to get two beds so the parents had one and Wesley had the other. The girls had the bunks at Space Camp.

 They were asked to not bring any electronic devices so they don't have any pictures of their own, but they got to ride on the 1/6th gravity chair which simulates walking on the moon. Kate says it felt like falling down more than jumping. They went on the 5 degrees of freedom simulator which is a chair on a stick that moves. They rode the multi-axis trainer without having to move an actual joystick to control their spin. This is the ringed spinner that you see on space movies like "Space Camp." Speaking of which, the movie was filmed at this same location. 

During their time, they also made rockets, created a mascot for their room called Cygnus taco dragon, devised a mars habitat, and worked a simulation of launching into space. For that part Kate was on Paycom. She got to ask the crew how the flight went. Kairi was on GN&C for guidance, navigation, and control. She got to tell the astronauts what the weather was so that they could launch. (She says she guessed because the charts were hard to read.) 

 

On the second day, Wesley, Chris, and Amanda went to tour the Space Center. We accidentally ran into the trainees!! The girls saw us first and wanted us to say hello. We saw them much later and from a distance and waved, but we were not supposed to talk with the space camp trainees so we didn't linger. 

After we picked them up on the last day we took more pictures of them at Space Camp. 

On display was the real life Saturn V Rocket that performed a mission to the moon. It is really, really big. Below is a 1/10th scale, and as you can see, I didn't get the full thing in the picture even then.

 

Here are the girls graduating. First in line is Kate then Kairi, although it was the other way around in the actual program. Their team name was Cygnus. 

And if you look real close, you can see the hard earned Space Ducks!

Since Chris, Amanda, and Wesley had 5 days of bumming around Alabama, we needed something to do. So Chris pulled of a brilliant plan: Find fun things to do without telling anyone what they were doing. 

Off we went! 

(We tried to not make Kate and Kairi too jealous, but they think we had a lot of fun.)

Botanical Garden

Our first stop was the Huntsville Botanical Garden in Alabama. Someone told me I was trying to find robots. I managed to find a statue!

A train track:

 A garden bed that looked like a grave:

A butterfly

Round stick art that you can walk inside.

Water. There was lots of water spouts in the garden along with a mister by fake dino bones that kids liked to run through. We enjoyed it too since it was hot.

We also had to make the sunflowers face all the same direction because they were not.

 

 

Tuesday was the next day in the week. 

The Escape Games

We drove to Nashville, Tennessee for some new adventures. Escaping adventures! 

Our room was "The Depths" and we "just barely" made it out alive after our nice hosts added a few extra minutes to our time at the end when we were not looking at the clock. To be fair, we were really close! We had to zip through the last two rooms, because we got a little knotted up at the start. (Sly hint included.) It was a fun room, and even better, Wesley enjoyed it!

For lunch, we visited the 

Pfunky Griddle

This is a fun place where you get to cook your own breakfast food. We had pancakes and french toast.

Parthenon

To help walk off the food, our next location was yet another surprise. The Parthenon. The real thing!! Okay, so it was just a replica of the real thing, but check out the size of these steps!

For reference, Wesley is not a small human anymore. He is (probably) taller than Amanda now who is 5 foot and three inches tall. 

You can see some storm clouds starting to roll in.

If you go into the Parthenon, you can go through an art museum of weird stuff trying to mimic Greek myths, old oil paintings, and then a statue of Athena holding Nike. I thought Wesley would be as tall as Nike, but I am wrong. Nike is a good head taller at 6 foot four inches.

 Grand Old Golf

Next up was mini golf at the Grand Old Golf and Go Karts. Sadly the go karts were not in service on this day. We did do an 18 hole mini golf game. 

Here we are hiding on hole 4 when it started pouring rain on us. The bushes did an okay job at keeping off most of the rain, but we dashed back to the office to stand under the eaves for a while until the rain let up more. 

As you can guess, the holes were all flooded after that, and Wesley lost his ball in a tube near the end so we had to share.

We had a sighting of the Planters Peanut car! 

We also saw a double rainbow on the two hour drive back to the hotel.

Ruby Falls

Wednesday August 8th of 2022, we were back in Tennessee at Chattanooga. (That is a city.) We got to see the incredible Ruby Falls which is a waterfall inside of a cave. Leo, who discovered the secret at the end of the crawl space, army crawled for 17 hours and then some to reach it.

In the middle is the narrow spot he crawled through. Not sure if I can fit in that space, and I'm not that large of a person either. It was really small.

He installed an elevator shaft down 420 feet (ish) and let visitors come to see the spectacle. The base rock of the waterfall was blasted down a few feet and the water redirected beneath the path for people to travel better. It lets out into a nearby river. Since I had no idea what I was getting into until I saw it, the waterfall was remarkable. 

There are now color changing lights near the falls which makes for some really fun pictures like this one that Chris took in slow motion.

There were some interesting cave formations as well.

P.S I learned that you should not drink the water there. It has way too much magnesium and will make you need to use a bathroom ASAP because it acts as a laxative.

One would think that our day was pretty much set after that, but no! Our next place was more rocks, but these ones were not underground. They were above. We saw the:

Rock City

 I really liked this place. Our shoes and socks were already soaked from walking into Ruby Falls through a rainstorm puddle. That place was on a mountain so the roads had some pretty good rivers. Rock City gave us some complimentary ponchos. 

 If you are curious, Wesley's shirt says: I need a Hug(e piece of cheese). It comes from the Carr Valley Cheese store in WI. Totally fits his personality right now.

There was a lookout point where you could see seven states at once. Since it was rainy and foggy, we got quite the view! Some Native American lover man got run off the edge of this place (Lovers Peak) and then his lover woman jumped off too. Tragic. 

I did enjoy it still though. We didn't have any crowds and got the place practically to ourselves.

Here is a sign showing what it' supposed to look like.

There was a black light area with a lot of carved characters from fairy tales.

Incline Car

Our next location was to go up an incline train car. It went to the top of Look Out Mountain, the mountain we had been on all day. The seats inside the car are slanted so that they are only straight when you are on the hill going up. It makes sitting down a little tricky.

You can see the city from here, but once you get to the top, you can only see fog even if it stopped raining.

We drove back to the hotel after that.

Cathedral Cavern

Thursday we started out at Cathedral Cavern. By this point I had no idea if we were in Tennessee or Georgia since we went between both of those the day before. Apparently, we were back in Alabama. Not to be outdone by the other cave we walked through, Cathedral Cavern is spacious. It got carved that way by a river and used by Native Americans for years. They only made it into the first two caverns because the rest was flooded, but we have been able to make it farther back. 

There is a gate there saying that there are bats, but there are no bats. Sad! I kept trying to find one. We did spot an owl that flew in the day before, some shark teeth, and rock formations. 

This has been a location used in movies: "The Secret of the Phantom Caves" and "Tom and Huck." I've not seen either, but our tour guide also told us that astronauts came through and practiced living in the dark there for two weeks. They found that they ate less, worked more, and slept longer. 

Here is Goliath.

And Amanda's personal favorite the "frozen" waterfalls. They are really made from flow stone and are still dripping with water that keeps making them.

The cathedral part was named for these stalagmite formations. My pictures don't do it justice so let's try a shaky video.

This particular column is an anomaly. It is wider in the middle and heaver on the top and survived a mass flooding that ran through the cave system at some point. 

If you can't tell, Wesley still needs hugs.

Noccalula Falls

What's after a cave, but another waterfall! 

This is one of those tragic stories where a Native American woman wanted to marry a guy in her own tribe, but they ran him out and had her all set to marry this other man from a neighboring tribe. She decided to jump off the waterfall on her wedding day before the ceremony instead. Her name was Noccalula. Despite another tragic waterfall, this place is very worth seeing. 

Once again, pictures don't do it justice.

As you can see, there is a large overhanging lip so that people can walk behind the waterfall. And yet again, we had it all to ourselves for as long as we wanted because it was a rainy day!! Not to mention that Alabama had started school and it was a weekday and most people were at work. For us, it was perfect. 

Wesley and Chris are to the left. 

Harmony Park Safari

After that, it was time to get away from rocks and waterfalls. We did not get away from nature. Not at all. It came right at us! 

Wesley and Amanda had no idea where we were heading so when we went into this back road to this strange house with a bunch of signs, we had no idea what was in store for us. 

The answer?? Animal feeding from the safety of the rental car. We were glad that no scratches got on the car as we saw some pretty big things heading our way. 

Meet the Emu's. There were a lot of them and all of them wanted to shove their head into the vehicle. We had to roll up windows. They were quite messy.

We saw: ducks, highland cows, Texas longhorns, deer, llamas, pigs, goats, emus, horses etc.

This one was a little long, but it's still fun. Promise.

That about sums it up!

We picked up Kairi and Kate from Space Camp the next day.

Trivia:

In case anyone is ever asked the name of a gas station in Alabama, Georgia, or Tennessee you can freely give one of these a try. 

8/10

Gas station names: 

Vulcan 

Pure 

Marathon 

Circle k 

Citgo 

Texaco 

Mapco 

Big Daddy Fuel 

Andy’s Market 

Hi-Tech 

Speedway 

Loves 

Chevron 

One 9 Fuel Stop 

Exxon 

Shell/ Mega Star 

Murphy USA

BP

Victory fuels

Sunshine 

Lotto Mart 

MJ fuel 

Fuel city 

Sunoco 

8/11

Sanann 

Country Farms

Wavaho 

Conoco 

Raceway 

C&S fuels 

Gas N Go 

Samco

CN Fuels 

Hobbs Island Pit Stop 

8/12 

Big A 

We counted 35 different names of gas stations that we spotted along the road!

 

Bye Bye!!