Missile Site Park

Did you know you can tour a retired missile site just over in Windsor (about 20 minutes from our house)? Yup. Totally can. A mom in our homeschool group organized a tour (thanks!) and we went yesterday. The boys loved it! (big surprise, lol) Here are some (not great) pictures:

From left to right, top to bottom:

• That's the boys horsing around before the tour started. They're actually standing near the door that gets blasted off from the exhaust when a missile launched. You can't see it here, but it was a good sized (and heavy) door that's only removed by the power of the blast...more impressive in person. ;)
• I wanted a picture of the boys and me but no one else was around right then and my arm isn't long enough, lol. 
• This is our group walking across the giant steel door that would slide off to the west when they were ready to launch. The missile would rise up from a horizontal to a vertical position (like dracula coming out of his coffin) and was targeted at Moscow. It could make it there in 25 minutes, going at mach-8. 
• Having walked off the giant steel door and around, here's us heading toward the big ol' door that was used for getting the missile in and out for maintenance. There's a "normal" door for people just to the right of the big door. 
• Once inside, we got to walk in the tunnels to the living quarters (now used for housing archival records for Weld County) and then to the missile area.
• That's the actual room where the missile would have been housed. The mock up on the ceiling is to show roughly how much room it took up. 
• We got to climb up and look down at where the blast would have taken place. Those yellow dealies show roughly where the base of the missile would have been once it was in its vertical position. There's a deep well-like area below that outlook where the power of the blast would have been directed...ending in opening up that giant door from the first picture. 
• My boys messing around with some of the equipment. Notice, Micah found a phone and is animatedly chatting it up. ;)
• The toilets. ;) Yup, just a big cardboard cylinder with a plastic bag liner. Lovely. I can't imagine what it would have been like to be part of the crews that lived here back in the day...

And that, my friends, is just a fraction of the information we learned yesterday. (And, yes, I'm sure the boys could explain it better and actually know the specifications and how the missiles worked and all. Please don't comment if I totally explained something wrong, lol.)

In any case, it was really pretty darn cool. Added to our archery in the morning (during which they played a dartboard game so got in some math, lol) and spelling, writing and geography in the afternoon...not a bad homeschooling day. ;)