STS trip

[gfish]

Since I'm still unemployed, and my parents were going to drive out to DC to visit my brother anyway, I've decided to fly out on May 6 and join them. And then we're going to drive down to Florida to see the STS-132 launch. (Maybe with a VIP pass? We're on the waiting list.) Not many Shuttle launches left, so I'm happy to finally have an opportunity to see one. My mom will then fly home from New Orleans, and my dad and I will drive a not-particularly direct path home (Spokane, that is), probably stopping to see aunts in Texas and a cousin in North Dakota. This will be the first time any of us have driven across the country, or done anything together on the east coast, so I'm pretty excited about it.

I'm looking for input on what we should make sure to see along the way. Right now I don't have too many goals: Colonial Williamsburg, Kittyhawk, the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque. If you read this blog, you should have a pretty good idea what I'd be interested in. (And for these purposes my dad can be approximated as a 30 year older version of me.) Ideas?

Comments

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

This is such a wacky route to visualize, but since New Mexico seems to be part of it--I'm reminded of my Kansas-to-New Mexico rocket tour. The Kansas Cosmosphere (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=2&ved=0CBcQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cosmo.org%2F&rct=j&q=kansas+cosmosphere&ei=uUnWS_G2J8KAlAf5qIDyAw&usg=AFQjCNEUvNisYlzNP3KFp6pazj98Uk0wog) in Hutchison, KS, has the best collection of Soviet space artifacts anywhere--you can see Vostok, voskhod, and Soyuz, as I recall, as well as a pretty good selection of US stuff. Then in New Mexico, there's the Goddard museum in Roswell, the Space hall of fame museum in Alamogordo, White Sands missile range, and Space Murals Museum (not much, but it's on the way and amusing.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Oh, and if you are doing the east coast of Virgina, the Mariner's museum has a replica of the Monitor and some of its salvaged components. I'm starting to itch to go see it.