Essentially this all started at Christmastime when Tim wanted me to go to Space Camp with Jenny. And after looking at my schedule I said ‘YES’! What a wonderful opportunity with one of your absolute best friends!!
Not a lot of in between except a few emails and occasionally looking on their page to see if any news had been shared for preparation. All we knew was the packing list.
Fast forward to this week. We actually made it to this point. After a busy few days at work, I got a chance to pack and we were out the door on Wednesday. 5 1/2 hour trip to Huntsville Alabama!
I really wanted to write about this trip because I had a hard time finding info and details myself when searching. So I wanted to write out some details.
We arrived with a nice sign on the dorms at the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH) welcoming us. The adults for educators camp were placed at the dorms rather than the camp location; since it was more kid friendly there. We were given our dorm keys by residence life, and met with one of the employees at the Space Camp to get checked in and our bags, and sweet space suits!
Now, let me tell you… we pack… we pack heavy! So we toted in multiple trips all of our stuff up to our room. We stayed in a suite style dorm room with one main small area that included a fridge and microwave. It was turned off when we got in so we had to rev it up to cool our drinks and freeze the ice.
In our side of the suite, there are 2 separate small rooms. Beds are elevated. Mattresses are about 3 inches thick. There were several dressers and a armoir in each room as well. A lot stuffed into a tiny space. We drug one of the dressers into the hall between our rooms to stick food on. There’s 2 sinks, a toilet, and shower in our section. The shower on our side didn’t work the first night, but we had the UAH RA get that fixed the following day.
We had our Keurig, waters, snacks, ice, and fruit.
We left for dinner at Bravo, to Bed Bath and Beyond and Walmart for a few things we failed to bring, then filled up the gas tank before returning to the dorm. Our suite mates were there waiting on us when we arrived. Carrie and Bailey also traveled together as friends from Missouri and we hit it off.
We woke Thursday morning ready for day 1. I was up early for a starting run at 545 am… it was bright outside. There is a safe loop around the campus that I used to get 3.5 miles in before returning to my dorm.
Our entire group met up at 7:05am in the lobby of our dorm. There were 11 of us. And only 1 group (versus the 2 groups last week and the 4 coming next week). Our group had people from all over… Florida, Tennessee, Missouri, Minnesota, Arizona, California, and North Carolina! Great group.
We hopped on the bus and it took us the 5-10 min trip to Space Camp.
We lined up for food in the cafeteria. They placed our food in a to-go box and we took it to the empty grill seating area around the corner – more for just us adults. Sausage, eggs, waffles, biscuits and gravy, fruit, juice, milk, coffee were all options.
After the final check in, we all hooked up phone numbers and photo circle for picture uploads to share in our group. We then took an hour tour of the facility with Brittany.
We then worked on designing a patch for our group.
We had a speaker, then turkey sandwiches for lunch while the Dean of the new local CyberSecurity high school program was introduced.
We then worked on building our rockets that we get to launch on Day2. Jessica then replaced Brittany for the day.
Met and listened to a speech by NASA writer/journalist David Hitt.
Followed by dinner in the cafeteria again and then a few small NASA movies.
We were done for the day around 7pm and loaded the bus and went back to the dorms.
Excellent first day! 16000 steps and 7.8 total miles for the day. Yeah almost half was probably from the run… but still…
runwithboys 