Friday, July 5, 2013

Back Home

For me, if I have the time, I try to make the journey an experience in itself. If we have to drive all that way, why not see something?
We stopped just over two hours into the return trip at Grissom Air Museum

Tyler at the top of the tower.

I have issues with height, but I didn't think this would bother me. Yeah, right, about half way up I realized I wasn't really enjoying it much. I thought about just climbing it to say I did it, but decided to go back down and take pictures instead.

In a fighter plane





After we left, we drove to Nashville which is just about the half way point. I don't usually stop until I'm into Alabama, but we'd planned to go to what sounded like a big mall. 100 Pines Mall. Good reviews online. So I used my Choice points (all of them I'd accumulated for the six days in St Louis and a couple other nights) to get a room ahead figuring we'd be at the mall until late. But the mall turned out to be just a few stores around a large medical facility. We were done in less than an hour. I'd have driven two more hours but I'd already booked the room and since it was for that night, it wasn't refundable.
It was a big room with a kitchen. A lot of people actually live there.

The kids watched about 2 1/2 hours of Duck Dynasty. I'm afraid I don't value its merits as much as some people.

Next day we left for Birmingham and it poured rain. At times it was very difficult to see the highway at all. Some of the time most of the other cars were pulled off, but we just kept going and arrived safely in Birmingham. We'd decided to go to McWane Science Center.

 
The Museum has four floors.
If you look closely, you can see Ty's face in the pins beside him.

DinoWars

High cycle

pulleys


Building a bridge

Bubble room



We had Subway and then drove the rest of the way home. The last hours felts so long.

I was gone two weeks and a day, but it felt like a month. And it will take me that long to get all the junk unloaded and  put back away. Anyone else get home, unload and wondered how they have so much stuff?? Or course some of it is book from convention, but some of it isn't.

Well, that is it about our trip. Overall, it was very good. From home to St Louis to Fowler to Elkhart and home was 2,400 miles. Everyone did well. There were issues, but they were dealt with and we went on.

Hope you all had a good fourth.

2 comments:

Rose Anne said...

Heck Kathy, I grew up near Grissom didn't even knew they had a museum. It was still a working base when we lived there.

Kathy Cassel said...

It has planes outside that we'd seen before but we've passed it too early for it to be open in the past but this time we were late enough the inside was open. It's not very big, but nice.