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BCoF 's Virtual 50-State Bucket List Tour, 2025 |
Fifty states in fifty days. Well, fifty states and the District of Columbia in fifty one. Fortunately, the organizer of our journey, Lyn's a Witchy Woman   , wasn’t expecting us to be modern day Phileas Foggs. NASA’s Space Camp for adults, for example, was going.My journey started a day before we were all supposed to meet in Huntsville, in my farmhouse in Arkansas. I was up in the wee hours of the morning, kissing my sleeping "Snegurochka"  before heading out to my aged Expedition. I carried out a few thermoses of coffee that I had picked up at a coffee house called the Midnight Oil, in a town half an hour northeast of my little farm.My dog Rosey, who’s part black German shepherd and part something that makes her ornery, intercepted me before I got to the back door. I promised her I’d be back in a few days, possibly with a new friend or two for her to meet. Mollified, she let me pass. I didn’t get on the interstate until the small town of Hazen, about an hour and a half west of Memphis, Tennessee. By that time I had a chance to stop at a little diner called TJ’s for a bag of sausage sand homemade biscuits. I also grabbed some donuts at a Shipley’s along the way. Both of these places opened early for the local farmers. And I do mean early. Our eclectic group was coming in from all over the world. Some were taking flights direct to Huntsville, others flew into Memphis. I was picking up the latter group, at eight in the a.m. It was a tired but excited group that loaded up in my Expedition, and they quickly divvied up coffee, doughnuts and sausage and biscuits. Fortunately, they left me a maple bar! About halfway between Memphis and Huntsville we stopped in a small town (less than three thousand people!} of Iuka, Mississippi (pronounced eye-you-kuh). While we were there, we stretched our legs by walking the summit trail of nearby Mount Woodall which, at eight hundred and six feet, is the highest point in Mississippi. Then we went to the Cream and Sugar in Iuka for meatloaf sandwiches. We got to Huntsville about seven that night, tired but content, and ready to begin our real adventure. The next morning all our group headed over to the NASA facilities for our three days of Space camp. After orientation, they first got us settled into our bunks. Yep, you read that right. Bunks, not Rooms. There wasn’t that much of an argument about who got the top bunk as when I was a kid! The next thing they did was take our group, along with other space campers, en masse to the multiple gee simulator. Remember those carnival rides where you were on the inside of the outer wall of a circular cage? Then the cage would start spinning around, pressing you up against the wall? That’s what this was, except fancier! After we got to experience what several gees feel like, we split into different groups for different projects. We were all going to do everything from jet simulators to underwater activities. I went with the group that was going to build and test heat shields first. Okay, I admit, I have a secret engineering geek inside of me. But the class where we learned about the history and science of heat shields, then designed our own heat shield and tested it against simulated atmospheric recently…I was in geek heaven! The next three days went by too fast. I learned they have an advanced Adult Soace camp, that lasts almost a week. I’m definitely coming back. And it would be cool if the group I came with was the group I came back with! |
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