We arrived at the north central Alabama Welcome Center late Sunday evening and spent the night at Athens. The AL Welcome Center is beautiful and recently won a beautification award. A large rocket sits on the grounds, welcoming people to AL and nearby "Rocket City" at Huntsville.Near the rocket are two large war memorials; Vietnam and Korea. I read the names on each memorial and found a former high school classmate on the Vietnam memorial, from Coffee County, Joseph M. (Mack) Moore.
The Korean memorial has the name of another classmate's brother, Roy Hattaway from Coffee County. His sister Nadine Fuller (a classmate of mine) did not know about the memorial. I'm glad we took pictures for her.
We decided to get off I-65 on the way home and go to the Space Center in Huntsville. The last time were were there was in 1986. You can only imagine the advances made in space during the past 25 years. Things that seemed like yesterday were displayed as obsolete now!
We were shocked that it cost $30 each to go to the Space Museum! And that didn't include the IMAX theater and some other attractions. It did include the Star Wars travelling exhibit which was great. I really enjoyed seeing the characters and learning how they operated. Here I am standing with one of my favorite characters, Chewbaca. We saw a model of him without his fur covering and all the millions of little wars and transistors inside that made him appear as a real live person (thing?). There were so many young kids touring the exhibit and watching them as they interacted with all the exhibits was so much fun. I was shocked to learn that the first Star Wars movie was made 33 years ago!
We spent about 1/2 day touring the space center but it was worth it. I'm glad we made a "spur of the moment" decision to go by and check it out. Star Wars was definitely the drawing card.
We left Huntsville and headed home to Elba, arriving home around 5 p.m. It was so good to be back home after having been gone for almost a week.
Yesterday we called Jim's cousin in KY to tell her we had such a good time, only to learn that on Tuesday, July 22, they had 6" of rain that night and flash flooding took homes, bridges, roads, etc. in the area we had visited. Just 4 days after we were there for the family reunion. It was so sad to look at the places we had just visited and the roads we had traveled.
Enjoy the present, forget about the past, and don't worry about the future because we don't know what the future holds. (Nobody said this; I just made it up!!)
