Our first stop inside the gates was the rocket garden. She's saying, "AAAAH ROCKETS!"
If only the door was still on. Sayonara kiddos! Say hi to the moon for me!
Our next exhibit was Angry Birds Space Encounter. Most of the activities were too old for our crew, but they enjoyed the real life slingshot game. I couldn't get a good picture of the whole set up, but there were two teams, a bunch of slingshots and piles of stuffed angry birds to sling up at the pig targets on the wall.
The only other angry birds activity that we tried was the maze. Inside there was slightly ominous music, and a maze of mirrored walls. Your mission is to find the exit. My kids were a little apprehensive, but we kept assuring them it was just a maze, nothing scary. We made it to the exit easily, or so we thought. When you get to the exit of the maze you are suddenly blasted with air and a loud horn goes off. Well, this frightened the living daylights out of all of us, but especially my children. With a shriek they both took off in the opposite direction, trampling everyone in their path. Tata and I had the job of chasing after them and basically fireman carrying them out of there screaming and crying. She and I were laughing so hard we were crying too, at the hilarity of it all. For the rest of the day Cam would randomly shudder and say, "I don't like them angry birds".
Explorers wanted? I think R is the only one of this crew that would make the cut.
We stopped for an IMAX movie about life in the space stations which was the perfect chance for Cam and Gammy to take a nap while the rest of us put up our feet, cooled off in the a/c and ate some snacks.
Our last stop and my favorite part of the trip was the Atlantis exhibit.
The experience begins in a domed theater where we watched a short video about how the shuttle Atlantis came to be. At the end of the video the screen slowly went up and revealed the shuttle.
The kids were underwhelmed by the shuttle, I blame it on their youth, but they loved this set of space tunnels suspended from the top of the very tall warehouse we were in.
The tunnel path made a large square back to the start, but in order to make it back to the beginning you had to crawl through a see through tube that let them see just how high up they were. It took Cam a minute to accept that he was not going to plummet to his certain demise.
From there we discovered these racing slides. The kids took at least three turns. Even Gammy, who's perpetually young at heart, got in on the fun.
We made a quick visit to the souvenir shop before we called it a day. The only part we missed was the bus tour that takes you to the launch pad site, but we didn't think the kids could last for two hours out and about on a bus. We had a great day at the space center. Thanks for all the memories and education NASA!
