Today I wake around eight, Liz beside me, staring into her iPad, television on some weather channel...it's getting pretty bad out there apparently, Chicago is at standstill from overnight blizzards, Oklahoma has declared a state of emergency, they've been getting three inches of snow an hour and there's a tornado alert around where we're currently lazing in bed. Liz has been on this since six. So we get a couple of bits of free toast and coffee from the very nice man at this very nice motel and then, dressed for colder weather, load up and leave for Houston.
Space centre Houston, is the official visitors centre of NASA's Johnson Space Centre, it's where the astronauts do their training and home to mission control.
We didn't actually get there till mid day, which was a shame really, because there was quite a lot to get round and we ended up skipping some bits.
We got to practice landing a space shuttle on some landing strip with a flight simulator, got to see a film covering the history of the American space project, which included some of the tragedy along the way, the 1986 Shuttle disaster in particular.
We got to touch a real slice of moon rock, brought back from one of the moon landings. There have been seven actual manned moon landings to date, the first in July '69 and the last in December '72. Since then, we've been setting our sights a bit further away.
Amazing to think that these men were sent to the bloody moon, back in the days when the Space station computer filled an entire room and had only two megabites of memory.
We got shown around the space vehicle mock up facility and saw one of the old Mission control centres, complete with red telephone, wired straight to The White House. The current Mission control is below this.
It was bloody freezing outside and we kept having to get into an open shuttle bus that took us to each of the sections on the site. The poor girl who was our tour guide, actually crouched under a bench at the back of the trailer, hoping no one saw her, she was so cold.
Liz got really excited when, on our last drop, we got to see the Apollo 11 rocket that
got those first men jumping around on the moon. She was ecstatic, dancing round and wiggling her bum, hugging the tour guide and asking her all sorts of stupid questions, like, "what happens to all the poo?"
Current location, Winnie Inn Suites. Very civilised, run by a guy who used to live up the road from me in Wellingborough.
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