7/11/2009: Wierdest Road-side Attractions You Never See

Part I

We landed in Sparta, Wisconsin yesterday. There wasn’t much, except for the only intersection in America with a historic building on each corner. We went to one corner, the one with the Deke Slayton Space And Bike museum.  Only me and Seth entered to save the money of everyone going in. The first thing we saw was a cool piece of moon rock, a scale telling you how much you weigh on other planets, and an orange bike that looked like a motorcycle.  On each side-wall were a row of TONS bikes, all different kinds, from the first bikes to the newest ones.

On the end of one row were a few interesting ones, like a lawn-mower-bike and a ski-bike.

In the middle of the room was the NASA and space stuff. Many of the things were about Deke Slayton, the man who stayed awake for 100 hours in the NASA control room to help safely land Apollo 13 back on Earth. He had wanted to go into space, but couldn’t go because of heart problems. Later on in his life, he did get to go with the Russians to help setup the space station. There was an old astronaut suit that looked like a dead person laying down.

There was also a small model of the lunar lander in a glass case.

There were other things, such as small articles about Deke, and artifacts from the spaceshuttle launches of that time. On the ceiling was a life-size model of one of the early planes, and a bigger than life model of a hand-glider.

In the back was a model of a “pod” and a flat cardboard space man with the head cut-out.

There was also a little, kiddie toy-room. We walked around a bit, and on our way out, we saw a mural.

Part II

Later that night, we had been driving for a while, but we stopped in a little town called Blue Earth, in Minnesota. It just happend to be Jolly Green Giant Day(the icon for Seneca Foods).

We watched an awesome fireworks show with a really cool finale.

Everyone there honked their car horns- and bus horn! Then we vanished, driving off into the night.