Welcome home, Atlantis

Did you all feel the landing of space shuttle Atlantis yesterday? It made our house shake and woke me up. 

The video above is of Atlantis returning to Kennedy Space Center from another mission. It was supposed to land there again, but bad weather brought the shuttle to the deserts of California. I love how the video shows the shuttle as slow and elegant, when really, the landing is an event so fast and forceful that we feel the earth shake from 133 miles away. So amazing. Here's a pretty good article about the most recent Atlantis mission.

As Ian and I sat around in our PJs discussing space travel and air force bases, I remembered a mix up I had as a kid. I thought that Nasa and Napa were the same thing. My Uncle Louis and his family lived in Napa Valley and to me that meant that Louis was an astronaut. I can recall asking my parents where the spaceships were we'd go to visit.