Nau speak: Vegas: September visit to the Springs Preserve & OriGen Space Exhibit

As part of my birthday celebration, Antho and I went to visit the Springs Preserve. The Springs Preserve is a 180 acre property a short three miles from Downtown Las Vegas, and was actually the origination point of the city itself! Within it's boundaries are a plethora of things to see and do along with an ever rotating seasonal roster of events, flowers, and activities. Since this initial visit we've returned several times and despite that we've yet to truly begin to uncover everything there is to do inside the bounds of the preserve! There's the gardens, naturally, but also several hiking trails, multiple museums, a zoo, an old west style town, a cafe, and much more! There's even a butterfly habitat during the warmer months where you might get to live out a Disney princess dream with the little lovelies landing on you...singing is entirely optional. What brought us here for this particular visit, however, was the Space Exhibit inside the OriGen museum.

While some of my friends dabble in astrophotography, which is incredibly beautiful, my curiousity in the cosmos stems largely from readings of Carl Sagan and documentaries/sci-fi. I do ever so love me a good (or sometimes terrible) sci-fi movie... and in space, no one can hear you scream...

We had so much fun during this visit that we actually sprung for annual memberships, which allow us to enter the gardens up to an hour prior to public opening as well as guaranteeing us free entry to the botanical gardens and museums for an entire year! When there's special events, like the Haunted harvest we'd later go to, the entry fee is discounted for members. For the two of us it was about $50, which is really quite reasonable for everything included, especially when you consider that it's easy to spend $50 on a movie night (tickets, dinner, etc) it felt worth it to us. We could have gone an even cheaper route, but we wanted to support the venue and since the preserve is also rather close to where we're currently staying it makes for an easy budget friendly choice when we want to go out and do something but don't necessarily want to burn through all the gas (and gas money) it would take for us to drive out to Mount Charleston or Red Rock. In all of our visits here, the staff have always been very pleasant and helpful. Walking among nature is known to be good for your health and we always leave the preserve feeling more relaxed and happy. Maybe it's from sunshine, or the exercise, but whatever the case we love the Springs Preserve!

More photos after the cut!

Antho's phone screen completely smashed when we sat inside the shuttle launch simulator...

😓

Ever watch a movie with astronauts and feel frustrated with how clumsy they seem with the gloves? Surely you, too, may have thought at some point, "But these are trained professionals! They've spent years training for this and they drop the freaking wrench in zero gravity when they have 30 seconds to fix the air leak?! Baaaah!!"

Well, honey, this exhibit is for you, then.

Imagine trying to do anything requiring even the slightest bit of dexterity through the heaviest oven mitts this side of Mordor and you've got an idea what trying to use these gloves is like.

I was humbled. No more shall I judge so harshly the sci-fi fumbles of the space suited characters.

Are...are we in Aperture?

Proto-testing modules, perhaps. GlaDOS would be pleased.

This game required us to quickly give each other commands as they flashed up on our screen while completing the commands given to us and our success was determined by how well we were able to cooperate. The game was intended for up to four players and with just the two of us it quickly became a lot to try to stay on top of, but it was fun! Clever idea, though, as team work is imperative, especially in high-risk situations like space flight.