Beautiful Bang (Summer Vacation Part II)

The last post left you at the Canada/US Border. We had to cross at the peace arch as we were in Vancouver. We never cross at the Peace Arch due to the long line ups, we waited two hours to get across. Thankfully we left in plenty of time.

The kids and I were headed to Bellingham to fly out to Las Vegas to visit with Paul's parents. Paul dropped us off at the airport and he drove back to Canada via the Sumas crossing and only had to wait for two cars in front of him.

We had just the kind of flight you want, totally uneventful, we landed in Las Vegas around 11:30 Saturday night. Paul's parents picked us up and we off to their house to tuck into bed.

The next day we hung out around the pool and relaxed. As the afternoon went on SeaBass was not feeling well, he had a fever and was tired. He ended up sleeping the afternoon away and only getting up for about an hour to watch the 4th of July fireworks from the front yard.

The other kids walked around the block for a better view, but it was all SeaBass could do to sit on the front curb and watch them. He ended up going in and going to bed.

The fireworks were amazing. They live only a few miles from the strip and all the major hotels seemed to be competing with one another to see who could out do whom. They must have lasted hour or more.

Our Summer Vacation (Part I)

We have been on a bit of an adventure, we started on Thursday July 1, Canada Day. We traveled to Vancouver for the long weekend to visit Ranj and Susan and their kids (they just had another baby boy)

Paul and I took the kids the space centre and had a blast. I could not figure out why the space centre has a huge crab outside but here you have it. It is really cool looking, but nothing spacey about it.

Inside there was a planetarium much like the one in the Bay Area. We watched a couple of shows about stars with the kids. They really enjoyed the one about the planets but I think the second one may have put us all to sleep. I am not really sure as I was one of the ones nodding off.

Photograph of blurb above goes with the picture above it. I only took the photo because I though it was pretty.

In addition to the shows in the planetarium they had an area that reminded me a lot of the exploritorium but with a focus on space. There was a lot for the kids to see and do there. The kids all climbed into this space suit for photos but Sebass had the funniest picture so it's Sebass you get for this one.

I was surprised they had this space suit there. It is the one the astronaut Collins actually wore into space. I was surprised because as far as knew it was an American mission and the suit does have an American flag on it. I know many of the missions were done jointly with many other countries so I am not sure why I was so surprised to see this there.

I was not aware that the Canada is so involved in space research and had such a big space program.

We got to sit a bit and listen to a guy talk about rockets. He was pretty good, he taught the kids the three laws of motion in a way that was really easy for them to understand. He got the kids involved in his demonstrations and used a hockey analogy to explain the science behind rockets.

Below is a photo of one of the rockets used to propel Saturn IV into space. (1969?) I should check the date for you but I am to lazy to look it up (I am on vacation after all)

Saturday all the kids had a swim in the hotel pool and we loaded up the van to scoot across the border. More on that in the next post.