My parents are in town for a visit and so they took us to the planetarium today. I believe one or two of the kids have been to the planetarium as a school field trip, but most of us have never been. We decided to take the train, since the planetarium is pretty close to one of the stops, and it’s just fun to take the train once in awhile. 🙂
The car that we were on was loaded with missionaries. The girls sat at a table across from some sister missionaries and talked with them the whole way.
We got off the train and walked to the planetarium. The walk wasn’t very far, but being July it was hot. Once we got inside the planetarium we found out we couldn’t take the strollers upstairs, so we had to leave them in the stroller parking area. We went upstairs and wandered around for awhile while waiting for our movie in the dome to start.
It was interesting to see a movie projected onto a dome shaped screen. I think the big kids, especially the boys, liked the “Exploding Universe” video. Adam and Lydia did not. They happened to fall asleep during the beginning of the movie, considering it was naptime and they were sitting in a cool dark place doing nothing. But when things started exploding that woke them up really fast, and they were not happy about it.
When the movie was over we went out and looked at more of the exhibits.
There was a set up to show what the landscape of Mars looks like:
My cute little Martian:
They also had a “Lunar Landscape”:
Hey look! That Martian is a moon walker too!
This camera was pretty neat. It could sense the heat of the people and objects in front of it and projected it in colors onto the screen.
We finished up our time at the planetarium watching a 3d movie called “Flight of the Butterflies”. Dad thought the girls would like that one. And so they did. The butterflies appeared to be flying right in our faces. I saw several of the kids reaching out to try to grab them. Adam and Lydia however, wouldn’t leave their 3d glasses on for long. They just wanted to play with them.
When the movie was over, and we had everyone use the bathroom, we got to walk back to the train station. This time we picked the WRONG car of the train to get onto. We just happened to pick the “bike friendly” car, and it was LOADED with bicycles and their riders. So most of us had to stand the whole way back to our stop. And each time the train made a stop, there was a huge shuffle to let people get off with their bikes and to let more people on with THEIR bikes. It was madness and it was impossible to keep the aisle clear. The employee working in that car of the train encouraged us to complain to see if we can’t convince the train line to add more “bike friendly” cars so they won’t just have one car jam packed with bicycles.
As we got closer to our stop, dad had me text Kyle to have him meet us at a restaurant for dinner. We ended up going to Texas Roadhouse, and they had to put us at two tables. That place is not very “large party” friendly. We were told they couldn’t make one big table for us, because of fire safety rules. Other than that, dinner was good, and everyone had a good time on our little adventure.