Visiting Houston! (part 3)

Yesterday was NASA day for us. We drove out to the Clear Lake area where NASA is located. As soon as you start approaching NASA everything seems to have NASA in it's title. From "NASA Flowers" to "NASA Bakery", and the McDonald's adjacent to the NASA grounds features an astronaut floating in the air holding a large fry. Lol!

Once inside the Space Center we began to look around. There were a few flight simulator type rides, an Angry Birds Space themed playland for little ones, along with a few areas that featured short movies, and some museum like items to look over. I'll be honest after paying the steep entry fee to get into the Space Center and looking around some we were starting to wonder if it was worth it? We did try one of the flight simulators which you must pay extra to go on. Someone had a bit of a freak out moment as soon as the doors closed and it was pitch black inside. Someone else had to spend time trying to convince the someone that was freaking out to simply breathe and take it easy. Everyone that reads this can guess which one of us had a freak out moment and which one of us had to calm the other one down. All I have to say is before arriving at NASA I imagined what a flight simulator might be like and that isn't what I imagined. Being put in a capsule in complete darkness wasn't comforting. It all turned out okay in the end but a little unnerving at the start.

We then hopped on the Tram ride. The Tram ride is the main attraction. The rest of it is not completely worth the steep admission price, the Tram makes it all worth it. The Tram is a 90 minute tour of the facilities. There's 3 stops along the route: Flight Deck, Mission Control, and Rocket Park. Mission Control and Rocket Park were definitely the better stops on the tour. You had to walk up 87 steps to get to the Mission Control room. Rocket Park featured an actual rocket that was nearly completed before funding was cut by the government. To stand next to an actual rocket was pretty sweet! An actual rocket not a replica.

Things that surprised us the most about NASA? The wildlife roaming about. Lots of deer freely walking the grounds. They also feature a Longhorn Preserve on the grounds. Well it is Texas....gotta have longhorns nearby even nearby NASA I suppose. Lol! Another thing that was surpring is how old things look. It doesn't appear there's been much updating of the NASA grounds since the 70's. I'm willing to bet there's little difference between how it looked back then and how it looks now. Sure there's new buildings mixed in and the Longhorn Preserve has clearly been added in the last few years but in general most of the buildings look like they are still representing well for the 1970's.

I think going out to see NASA while visiting Houston is a must and taking the Tram once there is another must. It was certainly fun. We did buy the souvenir pics. We normally don't care about those souvenir pics that are taken of us when we're at a theme park riding rides. But these souvenir pics were a little different.  Before boarding the Tram they snap your photo, upon returning from the Tram ride your souvenir pics are lined up to purchase. It's a rather complete package. There are quite a few pics in the package all the same photo of us with different NASA sites behind us. So we came away with quite the souvenir of pics. I'll post them after we return home.

Today I think we'll be heading to downtown Houston. Most likely going to the Downtown Aquarium. We always try to check out the Aquarium in every city we visit. The cameras are powered up and ready to go. It's our last full day here. Yesterday the cameras didn't make it through the entire Tram ride. We relied on our cell phones a lot to capture pics. So last night we had things plugged in all over the place as we charged 2 cameras and 2 phones. Hee-hee!