Space Camp

Bryce finally got his birthday present, and he has been really patient in waiting for it.  It was a trip to space camp in Huntsville, Alabama.  The testing grounds and construction site for the Saturn V rocket that took us to the moon.  The U.S. Space and Rocket Center has one of the Saturn V’s upright and on display out front and the scale is really astonishing.  However did we get something so large, wildly explosive and complex to work at all?  It’s beyond me and my feeble mathematical skills to comprehend what it took to design and get the vehicle off the ground.  

Like they say…  “Hey, it’s not like its Rocket Science.  Oh wait…yes it is.”

Bryce had an absolute ball at the center.  We were housed in bunk rooms that were designed so that they would fit into the Shuttle cargo bay to further give the sense of how small the spaces are that are required for space travel.  

Each one of the tubes in the background had an entire floor of rooms in it.  

We are so spoiled here on Earth with our expansive land and easy access to anything and everything.  All space crews exist in are little tubes (even on the relatively massive ISS) and the overlap of items required to stay alive makes the entire layout look like something out of an episode of hoarders.  Laptops, wires, clothes, food, several people, life support, and science equipment are everywhere.  Actually it kind of looks like my office a bit. Hmmm…time to clean up perhaps.

There were several simulators that the astronauts used to learn how to move and operate various pieces of machinery in space, and we got to play on them.  You can see them in action...poorly on my part...at the end of this post.

1/6^th chair:  Since the human body only weighs 1/6^th it’s Earthly weight on the moon, somebody had to practice how to move around, and this is what they used.  Even so, if you are used to a 170lb body here, it’s a bit awkward when you find yourself only weighing in at 28lbs.  Every push with a foot launches you 4 feet in the air and spinning.  

A highlight for me was that we got a chance to speak with Robert “Hoot” Gibson who may have the most impressive resume I have ever seen.  

Aeronautical Engineer from Cal Poly, First in his class at the Naval Academy, Top Gun graduate, 14,000 hours of flight time in literally hundreds of different aircraft, 300+ carrier landings, years as a Navy Test pilot, and a 5 time shuttle astronaut.  He was the pilot that docked with the Russian Mir and shook hands in the historic photograph with the Russian Astronaut through the airlock…  Sheesh…

Perhaps this handshake will be equally impressive in years to come...

Mr. Gibson spoke with the group for an hour and answered every question the kids could come up with.  It’s really wonderful to see brilliant people come and speak with kids and motivate them to work hard and study hard to achieve success.  The message was vastly better than ESPN’s version of success, and for most of us, more probable.  

Space Camp was loaded with smart people.  I felt a touch out of my league, but Bryce and I fit in well personality wise.  It’s a place that reveres and promotes unabashed geekdom.  It was unusual.  For instance, when kids were asked "What are you going to be?" they wouldn't just say a race car driver.  They rattled off careers like a Cardio Vascular Surgeon.  (and can pronounce it correctly) You may think that Ocho Cinco, or Dirk Nowitsky are cool, but they can’t do orbital mechanics…

Bryce couldn't wait to fly the MMU (Manned Maneuvering Unit) simulator.  Which, by the way, is a nifty little hovercraft contraption that floats across the concrete floor.  It was designed to teach shuttle astronauts how to fly the un-tethered propelled backpack.  (Untethered = Scary at 17,500 mph with no air and that whole fiery death thing)

Oh, you've seen this picture before?  

Guess who took the shot?  

Yep, Capt. Robert Gibson on the STS-41...

In a shuttle Science Mission Specialist simulation.  Bryce was the specialist...I was merely simulating special...

Bryce and I got to go through a few different space shuttle launch, mission and landing simulations, which were remarkably real.  Covering ground control, checking pressures in tanks and O2 supplies, while paying attention to about 20 different indicators, switches and mission clocks was actually somewhat difficult.  I can only imagine when one is dealing with actual launch and landing type conditions.  My hat is off to the men and women that run the programs at NASA.

Our days at Space Camp were filled with activities.  The day started at 6:30am with someone calling wake up from the door and we would work/play until 9:30 at night.  It was very much the way the actual astronauts live with specific timetables, but the benefit of having late nights at the Camp was we had the run of the place for an hour or so, and this included the massive Saturn V building.  

The museum had a full Saturn V rocket split into it's stages horizontally across several football fields of space.  At the end of this monstrous room, was the payload.  The Apollo capsule.  The photograph above is the Apollo 16 capsule that was used a few months before I was born.  April 1972.  We pulled this amazing technological feat off multiple times (including our greatest failure) with a mere 166KB of computing power.  Yep.  Your phone sneezes out more than that when it re-boots...

As to the space program now that the Shuttle program is discontinued, we don’t have a goal anymore.  Or more precisely, we don’t have an achievable goal.  We as a species have reached the end of what we can do practically.  We have learned so much and now are realizing that with our abilities to travel, we may have reached the achievable limits of humankind.  

Going to Mars is an achievable goal, but with the 5 years away from the earth to make the flight there and back plus the time in orbit and on the surface, I have a feeling that this would be a one way mission.  If we got the astronauts back, they would not live long due to radiation exposure in space, muscular atrophy, and bone decalcification in microgravity, never mind the mental impacts of being confined in a small tube for several years.  Anything further out from where we are, when it comes to manned spaceflight, is impossible.  And I mean impossible.  

Even if we find the elusive engine that will propel us 90-95% of light speed we are talking at least hundreds of years of mere travel time in an environment in which it is impossible for us to survive.  A one way trip in other words.  We as a world do not have the money or desire, or need to do something like that.  I say need loosely there.  Of course we have a need to try because, by definition of what we know, our time on this planet is limited.  We have a need to survive, but the attempt will most likely fail due to our frail bodies and our unfortunate lack of understanding.  There is an idea that it may save the species at some point, but we would need many generations of people during the transportation segment of getting to a new world and then the difficulties of setting up a base there would merely extend the human race a short time rather than save it.  


That fate coming true or not is up to the smarter kids of future generations that will follow well behind our short years on this planet.  The most amazing and comforting thing to me is that, above and beyond all that we have achieved thus far, it has been proven over and over again, that with determination and need, we humans have made some formerly impossible things...possible.

Enjoy the video.  Bryce's head is going to spin when he sees it... "Where are the light sabers!" he will say...  Heh Heh...

The Fridge Zombie

I rode the bike a lot this weekend. Thanks to my patient wife for sure.

It wasn't a lot in the terms of miles for some folks, so I'll be reminded by real cyclists that my workout time and miles spent riding was kind of "not really anything to write home about."

Really, the 110 miles and 7.5 hours of ride time over two days really isn't much more than using "training" as an excuse to go on a riding bender. Which is fun. It makes me stronger (allegedly), lighter (doubtful), but basically it's just plain old fun.

But there is a downside -- And that downside is pure evil.

When you come off a weekend cycling bender you are hungry. Your brain is telling you that you have a chance to drop some pounds because you are in such calorie debt that if you just eat normally you will shed pounds in the next few days.

But then eating normally becomes..."Well I'll have a snack too. Just not too much."

Then eating normally and snacking...some...awakens something awful. Especially when one is trying to lose some pounds. The Fridge Zombie. There is the metaphorical blood in the water. You have shown it food, and food it will have!

Over the past 24 hours, I have found myself taken over by the Calorie Monster or Fridge Zombie or whatever you would like to call it. I wander around the kitchen without any hint or hope of willpower. My brain is screaming, "Don't waste all that effort and not lose any weight after all that work!" While the body is standing zombie like with the pantry or fridge door open stuffing any and all food in to satisfy the need for calories.

Ah, there is nothing like the foolish regret of eating 5,000 calories in a day after burning less than that on the bike over the weekend. All that work undone (and probably then some) in one mighty collapse of willpower.

Ah, at least I had a diet coke with all that food...that'll take the curse right off of it...

Inland Surfing

A short post and a video.

I have seen this trend around the lake in the past couple of years.  Especially with the change in how every 15 year old kid on the lake seems to have an 80k wake board specific boat these days.  These heavy boats cast off fantastic wakes.

Eventually someone came up with the idea to overload the boat with water, create the biggest wake possible and then surf it. There seems to always be some really large ski boat toiling along at an incredibly slow speed with a skier mere feet from the back ski platform.

NOTE: Do not do this behind anything other than an inboard boat!  The pictures of hands and feet mangled by surfing behind an I\O (Inboard Outboard) are out there and horrible.  Just google it if you need proof.  If you see someone surfing behind an I/O boat, tell them to stop and let them ride your boat. Inboard boats have the propeller up under the hull and behind feet of wood and fiberglass where you can't hit it if you fall off.

 Rick and I have pitched in on new toys to keep the Master Craft interesting to the old and young in the past.  A couple years ago, we split possibly the most successful toy so far, the barefoot boom.  This year we picked up on inland surfing, and I see why it's growing in popularity.

After some "engineering" to get 500 lbs of water in a water bed mattress in the ski well, and then a few plastic storage bins of at least 300lbs more on the sides, we loaded up the people.  Kids, adults, kids acting adult, adults acting like kids, heck anyone we could find.  The more weight and the more people to view the spectacle the better right?

Of course the fine ladies we had volunteer to go along actually detracted from the weight with their ethereal daintiness, but we couldn't say, "Nope, we need all the weight we can, you can't come because you make the boat lighter!"  That would have been quite poor form on our part...  ahem...

In the end, with all the water loaded, the boat pilot had to sit up on his knees to see over the bow since we were plowing through so aft heavy, and to get the surfer to match the speed of the boat we ran at about 2,000 rpm.  The speedometer wouldn't even register it was so slow.

We struggled with learning the speeds and how to coast down the wave.  Well, at least I did, but we had a boat load of fun surfing in a lake all weekend long.

It's not my best video edit, but the subject is really fun and we had fun filming it.

Inland Surfing, enjoy.

Beware the Land Shark

Brenna was off watching some over hyped pop starlet in Atlanta last night and smartly stayed there overnight.  I, on the other hand, was here holding down the fort.  Which Brenna does a great job of handling every day, so her day/night out to catch a concert was well deserved.

We woke on Sunday morning.  Well, I woke on Sunday, with Aiden poking me in the nose saying, "I want to play with you...after you get me a waffle 'cause I can't reach them." I looked at the clock.

6:13 a.m.

Ugh...

The rest of the kids woke eventually.  By saying that, I mean that Bryce was up shortly after Aiden and Ansley dragged herself out of bed sometime around nine...uh...thirty.  Yep, she is a carbon copy of her Mom as a teen...already.

Once they were all up and semi-functional, I made Sunday morning pancakes, and began thinking, what in the heck am I going to do with these little people?  They were scarfing down the pancakes at an alarming pace, and I was quickly running out of time on my first plan for entertaining them.  Food.  I was going to be chased down with the same enthusiasm as they were eating breakfast, if I didn't come up with something fast.

I shouted over the breakfast time din. (Honestly, does anyone know how kids eat, shout, fight, hurt themselves while sitting in a simple chair, and breathe at the same time?  I don't know, but there must be some scientific study on it by now...I'll google it later.)

Anyhoo...I shouted, let's play a game outside before it gets hot.  Yes, I knew it was already too late for the hot part.  I swear I saw a bird on the bird feeder burst into flame a moment before, but I had to do something though.

What do you want to do?  Play knights, kings and pirates?  "Yeeufff!" they replied with mouths full of jelly covered pancakes, and then Aiden said, "and there should be a shark!"

Ok...why not!

They gathered up their shoes, put on swimsuits and got some ideas together on what to do.  Bryce said something about sliding away out of a castle on the zip line and crashing into a wall or something.  I figured, what better than to smash stuff while on a zip line.  Yes, I am a guy and assuredly my poor wife's 4th child.  The next 20 minutes were spent finding capes, swords and a shark costume...naturally.  We also spent a few minutes gathering up all the plastic blocks in the basement that we could load into the wagon in order to build a target...uh...castle.

When I saw how excited they were, I pulled out the GoPro.  Nothing that silly and playful should go undocumented.  Not with today's technology.  Right?

Well whether you agree or not that we should, as a society, spend lots of our time making dumb movies with GoPro cameras, we did it anyway.  And we had a blast!

Enjoy and happy Sunday!

A real JEM -- not apologizing for that one...

Ah, the final Utah mountain bike video that you have been waiting for, or quietly wishing I would accidentally forget about editing...

I can't tell you how much footage that Nathan and I took over the course of the trip to Utah.  The number of hours of video was a little over the top, but it has been loads of fun re-watching some of this stuff and trying my hand at editing together questionably interesting videos for others.  I do like to share these videos because it lets other people see some of the views that we got to see.  Bikes are great in the sense that they are quiet, you still can appreciate the views without the confinement of a car, you connect with the outdoors, and you can ride out into places that it would take many hours of walking and overnight camping to see.  Plus, it's a heck of a fun hobby.

I wanted to ride this loop from the first day we got there, but the rains kept us away and the trail a mess, so I had to wait until the last day before we were going to head up to Bryce Canyon.  Nathan opted to ride part of the ride with me, but wasn't in the mood to put up with the first half which included some grueling uphills to get to the top of the JEM trail.  Hurricane Rim was the first segment and it skirted the edge of the Virgin river and offered up some great views.  This ride also pointed out that I am totally directionally impaired.  I had a map and the map said that the trail turned to the right.  The trouble being that out in the wide open area, there were multiple jeep trails and other random single-track looking trails that were probably cut by animals walking through the tumbleweeds.

I ended up taking the wrong track and heading down into the canyon by the river at one point.  At another offshoot, I found that I was off in no man's land trying to follow the rim of the canyon around.  After about 45 minutes of riding, hiking, and fussing at myself liberally, a vulture flew close over my head.  It wasn't just cruising, it was checking me out.  I decided that was a sign to just find my way back to the original trail and head up a different direction.  I was furious.  I could still even see the house where we stayed out in the distance, but I couldn't get there because of a canyon in the way.  Nor could I call Brenna and say my ride plans had changed because cell service in the middle of the desert is sketchy at best.  I was officially not having any fun, so bailing out and just riding up part of the loop and coming back down seemed like the best way to salvage what was supposed to be a fun ride.

I rode up the JEM trail about a mile and magically found (drumroll please) the rest of the Hurricane Rim trail.  I don't know if that didn't tick me off even more because the map didn't say that the Hurricane Rim and the JEM were the same trail for any length of time.  I can't really blame the map.  I'm a little thick headed sometimes and probably just didn't read the map right.  Anyway, I was off again and had only wasted an hour wandering in the wilderness.  A true Moses ride -- thank goodness it wasn't 40 years of wandering, even though it was beginning to feel like it.

I found Brenna and Nathan an hour later in a parking lot looking worried.  I was after all, pretty late in my estimates of when I would meet them there.  The Goulds climb was looming across the road where I would head up a steep road for quite a distance before linking up with the Goulds trail and then the top of the JEM.  Nathan wisely opted to meet me on a side road where he didn't have to put up with the climb.  I being a little thick headed, as I stated before, wanted to ride up the thing.  The effort is cathartic in a way.

The ride was definitely better once I had a buddy with me.  It meant we could at least laugh at each other if we managed to get lost again.  The Goulds trail wound around the colorful reds, whites and even green looking sand/clay at the base of Gooseberry Mesa, and it was fun, but not the main event.  We were ready for the 8 mile downhill where we had seen signs that bike traffic was one way, and that bikes achieved "dangerous speeds" so to be careful.  That's a great advertisement for mountain biking if ever there was one.  Besides, there was nobody around for miles and we could enjoy the expansive desert views whilst tearing around as fast as we could get the bikes to go.

That's enough typing about a subject that most of you couldn't care less about.  I'll let the video show you more of the ride instead.  I hooked my camera on facing backwards and it worked pretty well, but it worked its way loose on the way down, so the video gets a little floppy in places.  I need to build a better mounting system, but the rear facing view was perfect.  We would get footage of both of us as we went flying through the tumbleweeds.

Enjoy.

They named a canyon for Me? -- Bryce Canyon

My son has been enamored with the place ever since he learned of it.  "They named it after me?" he says.  Perhaps not, but and after hiking around the entire place, I'll have to take him there someday.

I'm glad that he didn't go this time though.  He would have passed out within the first 2 miles, and we hiked until even Brenna stated,  "Not one more step.  It's hot. I'm tired. You can get the car." as she found a heaven sent log bench after climbing back up to the rim of the canyon.

I know I need to wrap up my posts about this trip, and I can't seem to find time to edit together the last big a "Moses Ride"(i.e. seems like you are lost in the desert for 40 years) video. I'll get to that next, but for the sake of getting a story written, I'll jump out of order and write up Bryce Canyon.

Of all the strange geological formations we have seen out in Utah over the past 2 trips, this pretty much tops it.  Arches national park was cool, but Bryce Canyon was something else.  It's high elevations and alien rock forms "hoodoos" are a true miracle to see and explore.  It's actually not a canyon, but a ridge where water has been eroding away the sides for millions of years dissolving the softer rock compounds away and leaving constantly changing spires and deep cuts in the rock.  The hoodoos look like giant drip castles from the beach.  Eventually the erosion will cut deeper into the high ridge and level the whole place out.

What struck me most was the color.  Every hour as the sun would move the colors would be different.  From a deep orange and white in the morning to pinks and tans in the afternoon.  The shadow effects were remarkable and made for photographs that you couldn't really get wrong.  Utah, makes my total hack photography skills better just by being there.

And with that, I see this post turning into one of my literarily (perhaps even literally) lazy posts and more into a slide show.  Hopefully you will enjoy it just the same.  Assuming that anyone even visits this link at all.

You enter Bryce Canyon NP from the rim and hike down into the base.  The trails wind all over among the walls and spires.  The place is actually named after a Mormon settler that famously mentioned that Bryce Canyon was "A heck of a place to lose a cow".  Fortunately for us, we weren't looking for any large animals down there.  The joys of a relaxing vacation...  I'm also glad we were up at 10k feet because I could tell even at the mid day temperatures in late spring that for much of the summer the canyon would be dangerously hot.

I love the twisted gnarled nature of the junipers and pines on the slopes all over the canyon country in Utah.  The environment is so harsh that they are just clinging to life on craggy hills, but they seem to keep growing just the same.

The rain hung over the far mountains, but never made it to us.  You don't realize how small our horizons are here in the southeast until you get to a place like this.  We are always surrounded by tall trees in the Appalachian and you can only see maybe 100-200 yards at any given time?  Out west you can see for miles quite regularly.  Not a bad thing, just an interesting observation.  If you grew up out west and came to the southeast it might be a pretty claustrophobic place.

We got up early to catch the sunrise over the park, and realized that we didn't own enough clothing for the high altitude temperatures.  

We were standing on the rim overlooking sunrise point (aptly named...) with the temperature reading 29 in the car as we pulled up to the park entrance.  The interesting variation is that when we finished the day the car thermometer read 98 degrees.  That's quite a change for one day.

The sun flashed above the horizon and the glow crept slowly down the rock faces as the sun cleared the mountains and mesas in the distance.

May 25th and there were mounds of snow 10 feet high still on the ground.  I have no idea how much snow this area must have had just a month before.

We climbed to the top of a rock outcrop to look back at the tourist laden observation area.  It does amaze me the amount of people that will drive everywhere in these parks and just hop out for a photo and drive on without exploring or even trying to hike around.  They are really missing out.

Hiking shoes got a few miles on them during this trip.

One of the many arches that are found everywhere if you look for them.

Bryce Canyon, a place I highly recommend visiting if you ever make it out to Utah, and as I keep finding out, we could spend years in the state and not see everything that we would want to.  I'll try to edit up the JEM / Hurricane Rim/ Goulds trail ride video for the next post.

Gooseberry Mesa - On and Off the Bike

That poor rental car.  There was a "graded road" that we had to drive to get to the top of the mesa.  I'll assume that when one grades a road, one doesn't grade the parts that seem straight up over rocks.  After finding the road that would get us up on top of Gooseberry Mesa at a non-descript turn off in Rockville, UT.  (pop 247), the dirt road climbs 1,000 feet in a few miles on some pitches where we were questioning the ability of the little red Corolla loaded with 3 huge mountain bikes hanging from the trunk to make it. We were creeping like one of those rock crawling jeeps to keep from bottoming out the car and tearing parts off. 


* Note: Not us -- this is just an example of what people do with their off road vehicles in Utah.  Interesting passtime.  I like the idea but wish they wouldn't tear the whole place up.  It's a free country though, so go for it.

A couple of times people would come down the road past us in their huge pickups with lift packages and they would hang out the windows cheering our progress.  It was slow.  Really slow.  Picking our way over rocks in a car that really only was designed to putter along on properly paved roads in suburbia.

The little car scraped and banged and bounced it's way up and up and up and eventually arrived at a parking lot where we gave it a rest as the sickly-sweet stink of an overworked motor wafted around.

We unloaded the bikes and decided to ride to the "practice loop".  Brenna was going to try her hand at riding the petrified sand dunes, but this was a big mesa and she wisely decided she shouldn't ride some of the trails.

The practice loop, it turns out, wasn't easy.

I keep telling Brenna that guys dig chicks with bike related scrapes and bruises! Well...with those battle scars, she is Ms. USA!

After a few swoops up and down the sandstone, crashing and generally feeling like she was over her skill level, Brenna decided to let us go on and we would meet up later.  There was enough to explore using some of the easier trails and the rutted dirt road down the middle of the mesa that she would be happily occupied without being terrified the whole time. Plus, up on the mesa top, our phones had service, so we weren't out of touch if something should happen!  Having functioning phones was pretty unusual since we spent the week having to drive to Hurricane or Springdale to get a cell signal.

We did meet up again out on the North Rim trail at an overlook, after our own crashing entertainment. Oddly, women don't think guys with bike related scrapes and bruises are quite as cool as we think they are.  They just think we are 8 year old idiots...  Oh well...at least I married the attractively bruised Ms. USA.  She is legally bound to hang out with me, even if I act like I'm 8 and ride bikes around all day.

Successfully avoiding the #1 reason why people fall off cliffs.  Posing for pictures...  The other reasons are listed in this post here.

Group photo - smile everyone!

The bands and layers in the mesa's edges would give you a weird vertigo sensation when you looked at them from a high point.  At varying times this area has been an ocean (and at one point part of the gulf of Mexico...sort of). Layers of sediment that were put down with different chemical compositions create the colors in the rock. 

Glad that Nathan joined me in getting more video than we can possibly watch.  I know the cameras are goofy, but it allows me to waste time and share our rides with people from our point of view.  Besides, we look goofy anyway, so the cameras on our heads don't impact a thing.

The elevation changes were dramatic, and worked us over pretty well.  Especially with the distinctly thinner air than we are used to at home.  I took this picture from the trail so you can see how much the trail would climb, descend, and twist around.

Riding home.

Nathan kept trying to bunny hop the cattle grate, and I kept missing the shot.  The camera wouldn't fire fast enough when he jumped, but I figured I would show this great picture of the grate.  Nathan cleared it and was just out of the shot to the right.  It would certainly be more interesting with him in the picture, but after making him do wind sprints 2-3 times to try to capture him mid jump, I guess we need to show something for his efforts.  Just imagine him there doing something X-games-awesome-super-cool in mid air in the middle of the photo...

A thunderstorm started popping lighting around us at the end of our ride, so we re-grouped and headed for home after spending about 6 hours riding.  On the way down, Nathan decided to descend the "road" we came in on by bicycle vs praying the brakes wouldn't catch fire in the Toyota.  He had more fun I'm sure, and even driving with the car in 1st gear the whole way down the road, the brakes smelled like they were hot enough to roast marshmallows over them.  Very nasty tasting marshmallows, but roasted nonetheless.

I'll save you any more of my long winded descriptions of bike riding among the rocks and ancient sand dunes, and let the video give you an idea of how cool it is to ride in places like this.

Enjoy and have a great weekend!  I'm heading to the beach and then to the lake!  It's a tough life...I know...


Gooseberry Mesa from Brad on Vimeo.