We went through Miami on this road trip twice actually.  We hit it on the way down to the Everglades, and then back when we returned to catch our flight.  Since we ran out of time, we didn’t get to stop by the ocean side and pick up a kilo of blow. Maybe next time.

The second 2006 roadtrip was not conducted on alternative fuels.

Our trip was wrapping up, and we had only a few hours before our flight out of Miami.  We elected to rush off to the Everglades to drive around and check out the swampy wilderness.

Once we saw the puma-crossing sign, we thought maybe it would be best to stay in the van and stick to the designated national park pull-outs.

Time slipped away from us, and we had only moments to spend at the national park sites.  We did an obligatory i-beam dangle, and headed back to Miami.

Glenn has the worst luck.

The second 2006 roadtrip was not conducted on alternative fuels.

Of all our NASA visits, Cape Canaveral is probably the most Disney-like and polished sites.  Their museum is geared toward the typical Orlando customer, so all the exhibits are bright and shiny, and the artifacts have undergone jazzing up.

Of course, Glenn found a lunar rover, and he loves those things.  We had to get a photo.

The center provides a shuttle tour of the entire cape.  In the picture below, you can see me in front of the 2006 STS-116 Space Shuttle Discovery, on the launch pad in the distance, preparing for their upcoming departure.

We passed the infamous Vehicle Assembly Building, which is the world’s largest building by volume.

The grounds have all sorts of NASA vehicles scattered all over the place.

We even got close to the solid rocket boosters.  They are MASSIVE.

Pretty cool tour, but we still liked the Stennis Space Center better.

The second 2006 roadtrip was not conducted on alternative fuels.

The facts we learned on the Ponce tour were really intriguing.  Like for example, Poncey was the tallest on his ship and for a typical European in the 16th century.  He was 4’11”.  The rest of his crew averaged out at 4’8″.  They got to the New World and encountered the natives of what would become St Augustine, and they were over 6 feet tall.  He then assumed this region had some kind of Fountain of Youth to keep these so-called “savages” in good health.

The found a spring nearby that was contaminated with a natural sulfur supply.  Poncey took a drink and proclaimed this to be the best tasting water on the planet.  Turned out his water supply on his ships had been contaminated and moldy from months on the ocean, and this St Augustine water was just relatively better tasting.

Glenn and I gave it a taste.  It was …. um… unpleasant.  It stunk like someone farted in your drink.

Glenn remarked, “One of Poncey’s buddies must have left a little surprise in the kegs of water when they left the port in Europe.”

The second 2006 roadtrip was not conducted on alternative fuels.

Near the small town of Macon Georgia, there is a First Nation site of significant importance.  It’s the massive Ocmulgee mounds, and they have a wonderful museum and visitor’s center.

Just for some scale, that is a picture of Glenn atop one of the biggest mounds:

The tribes built supported tunnels and chambers into the center of these mounds.

The center allows visitors to enter these chambers and experience the majesty of their pre-Columbian lifestyle.

At a certain point, Glenn fell off the edge of the mound.  Before I went to help him off the ledge, I snapped this photo.  Documentation comes first, then safety.

The second 2006 roadtrip was not conducted on alternative fuels.

Sometimes, there was a Waffle Houses on both sides of the road.  They are like a rash.

Getting bored of driving, we pulled off to see the Atlantic Ocean up close.

As we drove through Savanna in the late afternoon, we decided to visit the famed Fort Pulaski.

I never knew how far back the history of Pulaski stretched.  As an indication of the battle scars, the grey bricks date back to the Revolutionary War and before, and the red bricks pertain to the Civil War battles.

Everything is heavily fortified and the walls are crazy thick.  Munitions caches are even more protected.

The entire fort is surrounded by a formidable moat, and the entire campus is located on a Cockspur Island jutting out to protect the town of Savanna from naval intruders.

The cannons on this fort had an accurate range of over a mile.  That meant any invading ship didn’t have a chance of escaping the reach of Fort Pulaski.

The fort is worth a visit.  Check it out if you are in Savanna.

The second 2006 roadtrip was not conducted on alternative fuels.

After visiting Kennesaw Mountain, we drove to downtown to visit some of the Martin Luther King Jr sites in the city.  Notably, we had to visit the infamous Ebenezer Baptist Church were MLK preached for years.

Nearby, the Martin Luther King Jr Tomb is situated for guest to pay their respects.

It’s a pretty somber place.

Also, King’s birthplace  and historical park is across the street.  We spent the majority of our day checking everything out in the cold November day.

The second 2006 roadtrip was not conducted on alternative fuels.

After driving through the night, we arrived in Atlanta way too early to do anything.  All the museums, shops, and stores were still closed at sunrise.  So we stopped at Kennesaw Mountain and their visitor’s center/museum to check it all out.  Turned out Kennesaw Mountain was a pivotal moment in the Civil War.  It marked the change of the tide for General Sherman as he marched over the south in the end of the war.  When he took this mountain, he got the upper hand.  His victory here led to the decimation of Atlanta in the following weeks.

The grounds allow for a self-guided tour of the battlefield and mountains.  A hike was just the kind of thing we needed after several hours of night driving.

In 2006, we cruised through Montgomery in the middle of the night.  Nothing was open, but we managed to find the outside of the Civil Rights Memorial and snap a quick picture.

The second 2006 roadtrip was not conducted on alternative fuels.

We got into Mobile in the afternoon, and I hadn’t been to the Gulf of Mexico since 1990.  So why not go swimming?  Maybe not.

In Mobile, they have the USS Alabama docked and ready for tours.  It’s an impressive ship.

Glenn volunteered to move the ship around the bay, but MP’s restrained him.

The grounds has lots of military sights to see, but we were running out of daylight.  They were closing the place down.

We zipped over to the nearby submarine tour, and after they kicked us out, we moved on to Atlanta.

The second 2006 roadtrip was not conducted on alternative fuels.

One of the best NASA sites we ever visited (possibly the best) was Stennis Space Center.  It’s the place where NASA tests their rockets.  It’s located in the southern tip of Mississippi in the middle of nowhere.  In fact, it’s so remote, you can’t get on the tour by driving there.  You pull off in a typical rest area, and wait for the NASA shuttle to stop by.  They take you to the center and museum for a few hours, and you take the shuttle back to your car at the rest area.  It’s wild.

We got to visit their space module park.

And we got to tour their museum.  They had a lot of artifacts.  They even had real Apollo mission capsules and other items.  Everything was straight from NASA, and nothing was dolled up or Disney-ified.   You got to see the actual tiles that heated up in the atmosphere.

At one point, Glenn stole a Commander’s Space Suit and tried running out of the building.

Outside the museum, they have a park of rockets and engines.  We wandered around the grounds checking out the interesting items on display.

Also, Stennis Space Center has bleachers for watching the rocket tests.  The tests are massive and shake the ground.  The burns are so extreme, that the accumulation of burnt oxygen and hydrogen causes the climate to change on test days.  So much enters the atmosphere, that it can make a sunny day sky produce rain.  The bleachers are covered just for this possibility.

So if you are in southern Mississippi, be sure to visit our favorite space center:  Stennis Space Center.

The second 2006 roadtrip was not conducted on alternative fuels.

What does a Packer fan do when he is in Mississippi?  Naturally, he visits Brett Favre’s hometown and statue.

We left New Orleans in the evening, hoping to find a hotel off the interstate near Kiln Mississippi.  What we didn’t know was, even though it was 11 months after Hurricane Katrina, the majority of the coastline cities were still completely demolished.

In the drive to Kiln MS, we got to a hotel that 75% of the structure had completely washed away.  The “lobby” was one of the rooms, taken over by the hotel manager.  We unknowingly woke him up, but he was rather gracious with us.  He said there was a makeshift hotel set up down the road near Bay St Louis, and they might have rooms.  Contractor from all over the country were setting up shop in these remaining hotels, so they can aide in the reconstruction effort, so vacancy was sparse.

We got to the “hotel” to learn it was a converted barn.  Someone literally just partitioned a barn with crude studs and wood paneling, and started selling rooms.  We got a room that had exposed electrical and straw on the floor.  We slept on the blankets in our clothes because we were convinced we would get bed bugs or even worse from the mattresses.

The next morning we took a drive in the daytime, to survey the city.  Every building was either completely or near-completely destroyed.  Like this:

We found one restaurant open: The Waffle House.  It was disgusting, and that’s really saying something because most Waffle Houses are disgusting at their best.  But this one still had mud and mold damage all over the dining area.  There was a layer of film all the way up to the 4 ft from the floor level, covering drywall, booths, windows, and everything under 48 inches tall.  They didn’t even clean it all off prior to reopening.

After visiting NASA in Houston, we headed east to New Orleans.  We crossed Louisiana in the daytime, and saw a lot of harbors.  I even found a favorite Cajun radio station (KBON) that I stream online at work.

As we got into New Orleans, we started seeing the damage from Hurricane Katrina from the year before.  Houses and streets were still in shambles.  Spraypainted messages littered the landscape.

There were some properties that were completely destroyed.  They were nothing but a heap of building rubble.

Now that our spirits were completely deflated, Glenn insisted we go get some beads and head over to Bourbon Street.  He saw Larry Flint’s shop and got an instant erection.

I convinced him to leave the Larry Flint shop and go find some Cajun food on the bayou.  We wandered around looking for a restaurant that was open really late.  Thankfully, the French Quarter doesn’t sleep, and we got a nice place. I had lots of jambalaya and Glenn likely at something that thrashed up his belly-box.

Even though the French Quarter was open for business, the place had lots of existing hurricane damage.  There were streets where we found a layer of mud coating the footings and facade of the buildings as far as 3 or 4 feet up the building.  I can only imagine the mold problems on the interior.

We walked over to the Superdome site as our night came to an end. 

We had to hit the road in order to find lodging between Louisiana and Mississippi.  We had an early morning the next day.

The second 2006 roadtrip was not conducted on alternative fuels.

We flew into Houston late in the night and tried to meet up without cell phones.  It was a hassle.  I ended up on some shuttle out of the campus and Glenn was nowhere to be found.  Eventually we got in touch over the CB radio on the shuttle (I was the only guy left on the bus, and the driver was very gracious to entertain my search at such an odd hour in the night).

Finally we met up after Glenn’s flight was delayed, and we drove to Houston Space Center right as they opened up.  The have a lot of stuff.  Even an entire Saturn Five:

They have mockup Apollo control modules that you can go in to play in for the kids.

I’m kind of amazed at the quality of the mechanics and electronics on these Apollo crafts.  It’s like what you would find on the inside of an old alarm clock from the late 70’s.  I know that stuff was state-of-the-art in the mid-60’s, but still, I don’t think I would trust my ass to ride a ICBM to the moon and back.

They have a tour of the Shuttle maintenance hanger too.  It was dimly lit, so this was the best photo we could take in 2006.

We even got to see the actual Apollo Space Program Mission Control Room.  They said our phones and watches had more computing power than the entire building.

At the end of our NASA tour, Glenn gave a speech to an intrigued crowd.  After ten minutes of incomprehensible rambling, security escorted us off the campus.

Overall, it was a good trip.  Houston space center has a lot of real NASA artifacts, not just the Disney-ified tours of Cape Canaveral.

The second 2006 roadtrip was not conducted on alternative fuels.