Tuesday was a flying day for me. I am not sure why it worked out that I did not have any classes scheduled today. But, I didn't. So, I took full advantage of the time and went flying twice. The first flight of the day was a trip down to Corpus Christi and back. And the second flight was over to Austin and back. It is always a good day when you can fly. It is a great day when you can do it twice.

Wednesday we skipped out of town and traveled to Virginia for our class tour of the Langley Research Center. It turns out that with the contracts and the travel regulations that the government has, there is no straight forward way to get to Langley, which is near Norfolk. We had to first fly to Baltimore and then take a connecting flight to Norfolk. That makes for a long travel day.

I hate to say this (especially being St. Patrick's Day), but after we checked into our hotel, we caught a quick bite to eat and then got together as a group and studied for our test. It would have been nice to go out and see some of the town and partake of its restaurants, but our test is coming up on Monday. Being on travel for the rest of the week, our free time to study is limited. Ah well, I'll just have to go back some day and see the sights.

We dived in to the tours bright and early Tuesday morning. I should probably point out that when we left Houston, it was a beautiful spring day. However, the weather was not quite the same in Virginia. We had some snow drifting down today. Brrr. We spent about half a day at Langley learning about their involvement in Mars research, their wind tunnels, their structures and materials research, and their data visualization and analysis lab. All interesting stuff and the typical whirlwind tour.

The rest of the day we did educational outreach. We split up into groups and traveled to various locations and talked to kids. Most of us went to schools, but the group I was in went to the Virginia Air and Space Center and talked to kids who were on field trips. The kids were great. They love hearing about space and have tons of questions. It was a good time had by all. After a full day of briefings and tours and giving talks, it was back at the hotel and back to the books.

On Friday we learned about the research Langley is doing to provide improvements in general aviation navigation. Following that we got to spend some time in their hanger and crawl around many of their research planes. We then dashed out and spoke at a few more schools, went back to Langley and had lunch with some of the employees, and then headed to the airport for the long trip back to Houston. This was a short, packed trip. We got home quite late. I am sure you have guessed by now - I spent the rest of my weekend preparing for my test.