Day 4: Huntsville, Alabama

Today was largely for our rocket boy, though we all enjoyed it. Wasn't a terribly long drive from Memphis to Huntsville, just shy of 4 hours. We had a couple of little rain showers along the way. Mostly we were just on
a little two lane highway winding through the country side of far north Mississippi and Alabama. It was pretty and green and pretty quiet. 

I love where we live in Texas. Austin is a great city, lots of things to my liking. But being somewhere with more green and trees and a road that goes up and down some hills a little makes me miss some parts of Virginia.  I have no desire to move back there, but there are times when I miss the scenery.  So, on this trip, as the majority of it will be in the scenery that I love, I will soak it all in. My favorite roads are those that pass under a tunnel of trees. I love looking up and seeing the trees meet over the roadway with the light filtering down through it. We passed through one of those this evening.

The main goal for the day was the Space & Rocket center. It's kind of hard to miss as the Saturn V rocket on the grounds is standing erect and all 36 stories of it are visible from the highway. The museum had some really interesting exhibits. Rocket Park and the discovery center dedicated to the Saturn V rocket were certainly the highlights. We all learned a bit, could have spent many more hours there reading every little placard.

Perhaps the most well known part of this center is Space Camp. Kids from 9-18 can spend a week here during the summer prepping for their hopeful future as astronauts. The camps are divided out by age and become more intense in the older groups. The camp geared towards the 15-18 year olds will even qualify for a college credit. Bet you can't guess who wants to go to Space Camp. I would love nothing more than to send him. Who knows what the future holds.

We spent a small bit of the evening exploring historic downtown Huntsville. It's very pretty, the historic parts remind me somewhat of Fredericksburg, VA, or Fort Collins in Colorado. Smaller than both of those cities though. Lots of trees and green, historic buildings, corner cafes and restaurants. There was a very pretty park to the one side of town, lots of steps down with a cascading waterfall and a little river full of ducks. There was one family of ducks, mama and 10 babies. Ten little ducklings is probably one of the cutest things ever to watch. One little duckling got kind of far away from mom and started swimming in circles, crying. Obviously he was in distress. But, he persevered and eventually found his way back to mama. Anyway, it was nice to walk around down here.

We capped off the evening with some fine German food, and now we are getting ready for the next adventure.