Last weekend, we drove to Houston. The land here is so green and beautiful. We even saw an LDS church building along the highway!

As we entered Houston, there was a beautiful sunset in the west, and the moon was huge and bright as it rose in the east.

On Saturday morning, we had the opportunity to go to the Houston, Texas temple! It was so beautiful. The architecture and landscaping were lovely, and we had a wonderful experience inside. I’m so grateful for the temple and to live close to many temples!

After our visit to the temple, Adam and I changed and drove to the Johnson Space Center!!! (That was the real purpose of this trip.) Adam has wanted to go here almost as long as he can remember.

I’m going to let him post about the Space Center, but I want to add this cool note: We were in line for something in the space center, and there was a couple with a little girl. The dad asked it we would take a picture for them, so we did. Afterward, they saw Adam’s BYU shirt, and the man said, “BYU? I went to BYU.” They were LDS! It was so great. We were practically instant friends. What are the chances of running into and meeting LDS people there? Slim to none. Anyway, I thought that was cool. They snapped a picture of us too.

Adam was really excited to be there. 🙂

Ok, just so you don’t get confused, this is Adam writing now.  We went to the exhibit at Johnson Space center that had artifacts from the manned space flights. I’ve known tons about all of this since I was 2 years old and seeing all of the spacecraft and related paraphernalia was really cool for me.  Those of you who know me well can imagine how excited I was!  In the exhibit they trace the history of manned space flight from the Mercury missions all the way through to the Space Shuttle. This first picture is of the spacecraft Faith 7 from the Mercury program.  It’s really, really small and so the astronauts had to be a certain height to fit in it.

After the mercury Missions came Gemini.  It was named this after the constellation Gemini which is of twins.  The Gemini craft held 2 astronauts but really wasn’t too much larger than the Mercury capsules.

This next picture is of the Apollo 16 command module. This is the only equipment that returned to earth after the last lunar mission.  I’ve loved these missions for a long time. When I went to the Smithsonian museum when I was in high school they had an Apollo capsule but it was all encased in plastic.  On this one the door was sticking out past the barrier.  Sarah told me that there were probably lasers and things making sure you didn’t touch it but I touched it anyway . . . don’t tell anyone.  I’m kind of like a little kid when it comes to this!

This next picture is inside of a mock-up of the Skylab space station. This was the first American space station and all it was was the first stage of a Saturn V rocket that was converted into a space station.  It was bigger than it looked in the pictures I’ve seen. Sarah told me that she could see me living somewhere like that.  That would be really cool.

This is a replica of the Mercury Redstone rocket.  This is the rocket that took the first American, Alan Shepherd, into space. It isn’t very big at all and only barely could get a person into space!

Inside a big building next to these rockets is the massive Saturn V rocket! It is huge — 363 feet tall and 33 feet in diameter.  The five main engines on the first stage are big enough for a person to stand in! The next picture gives you an idea of how large they are!

In the picture below I’m standing next to the command and service module portion of the space craft. This was the part that actually went to the moon.  The service module,  the gray part to the left of the picture, is the part that had the explosion on Apollo 13.

This picture is the entire Saturn V.  You can kind of get a feeling for how big it is!

Well, there’s way too much to write about with my space obsession on a single blog post but if anyone really wants to experience it first hand, come and talk to me and we’ll arrange a trip back to Johnson!  On the way back home to Austin we saw this beautiful sunset.  All in all we had a wonderful trip. It was kind of our first official vacation as the Arnesen Family!