I suppose its good I didn’t know about it.. I probably would have gotten into trouble. Who knew you could buy potassium nitrate (stump remover) at the hardware store, mix it with plain old sugar, and make rocket fuel? So fun! My friend Steve and his son made a half dozen of these this afternoon. It’s simply 3 inches of 1 inch PVC with a hose adapter as a nozzle. The performance was impressive! The sugar is the fuel, and the potassium nitrate is the oxidizer. You can read more about it on Wikipedia: Rocket Candy.
🙂
Anyway, here is one of them being launched today. Sorry, I should have gotten pictures of the process.. but I was too wrapped up in it and forgot to document it.
I’m just going to highlight a couple pictures.. I took over 100 of them, but here are half a dozen exceptional ones.
We started our trip by driving down to Florida to fly out of Miami. (The tickets where significantly cheaper from there as apposed to Augusta) So on the way down, we had to stop to see Kennedy space center. We got to the KSC an hour early, (we had 8 hours to get to Miami~4 hours away)
They open at 10am.. that’s OK, we will wait. The kids donned some skates and had some fun skating in the very empty and very large parking lot.
About a half hour in, I said to myself.. ” um, how much are the admission tickets anyway?” So I walked up to the gate.. 44$ for kids, 55$ for adults?? Are they crazy? I guess if I was going to go there all day, but not a chance for a hour or two. So we went to search for some freebies. We found this Mercury Redstone rocket in a NASA office parking lot down the road.
OK, so we got through the airports, OntoSt Croix, and eventually, to the beach! (OK, I know I skipped a bunch of steps.. sue me)
I thought this nannyrama was pretty cool. Hannah is on the right.
one of the sights we visited was at the Eastern most point of the Island, and technically, within a mile or two of the easternmost point of US property… I gotta say, this was cool. the Easternmost antenna of the VLBA!
We got a little closer, and I got Hannah in the picture.
Then, on the last day, we went to a Boxing Day celebration at a camp on the west coast in the rain forest. On the way there, no big deal, we just came across a 10 foot long, 200 pound Boa Constrictor.
We finally got to the camp. Its actually owned by a neighbor of kath and the kids. Here is the food line.
At that camp, they had a cool turtle sanctuary. Are my kids afraid of nature? I don’t think so.
I will load more later. Glad to be back. I will miss the kids, but I think the adventure will be worth it for them.
