This weekend's fun was a drive to Huntsville Alabama's Space and Rocket Center - home of Space Camp. We went with big kid's cub scout den. It was a lot of fun! The bad part was waking up at 4:00 AM to start the drive from Alabama to Huntsville.
The Space and Rocket Center Museum is really top notch. It's not as big as Cape Canaveral, but it has three large areas, plus the Space Camp part itself. The bigger cub scouts were doing an overnight Space Camp, we just did the museum in a self guided tour (although there were a lot of great staff at various exhibits to tell us information.
I learned (through the wonders of Wikipedia!) that 1 on 13 people in Huntsville are employed in the Engineering sector. It's actually a pretty nice little city. We stayed at the Westin, with was superb. And we could really use the fancy hotel after a long day.
One of the coolest parts of the trip was the IMAX movie, Magnificent Desolation, which was all about all of the moon walks in the various Apollo missions. It gave you an interesting impression of what it would be like to be on the moon, with the immersive IMAX dome experience. Big kid actually absorbed information from the day - later that afternoon I caught him playing "moon walk" with the model moon rover, astronauts, and LEM the kids picked for their souvenirs at the gift shop.
Another highpoint was Ben climbing the rock wall. We were lucky enough to walk up there when there weren't any other kids in line and he got to climb about 10 times. He did so great - almost all the way up to the top!. I will post pictures after I get more time.
If you are looking for a Toronto hotels or anywhere else they have a Westin - I can recommend them. We got a deal because one of the cub scout parents worked for another Starwood hotel so we were very lucky to stay at such a nice place at a discount. Nice.
