Maze is 25!

This weekend was my birthday, the quarter-life one. Am I supposed to have a crisis soon? Eh, I'm fine the way I am right now.

I decided to make a minor change to my Travel section. #20: Stop by 5 small towns along the highways was originally meant to go alongside one or two trips. The thing is, when it's just Hubby and me, and we're going somewhere, stopping in a small town isn't in our plans. However, visiting my mom or my mom-in-law, we love those small towns. The quiet "historic downtown" areas you get, where every building has its history, every shop is an antique or used items place, and a McDonald's is nowhere in sight. So, I'm changing it to visiting 5 "historic downtowns". It's basically the same thing I originally intended, it's just less likely to be as random and rushed as the original was. With that change, I've got two under my belt - Waxhaw, NC (Hubby's hometown) and Burnsville, NC, where we spent this weekend.

I mentioned the stargazing a few posts back. We could not have had a better night for it! Friday, it rained almost the whole way to my mother's place. Saturday dawned bright and shiny, with a few clouds. We drove to Burnsville and spent the early afternoon enjoying lunch and shopping there before we could check in. Hubby and I ended up leaving an antique store with a few bags: a porcelian rabbit (my mom collects them), an old bayonet we're still looking up the origin of, a few old pins, and a gift for my mother-in-law (that I'm not gonna say because she reads this :P). We also ended up staying extraordinarily late after they closed at a used bookstore talking to the owner, her son and another customer, all video game fans.

We stayed at a bed & breakfast there called the Nu Wray Inn. Built in the 1830s, it's the oldest continuous boarding house in NC. The owners had only bought the place a year ago when it went up for sale, so they were still working on furnishing the place. It was still lovely, albeit a bit sparce. We got dinner at a restaurant across from the inn and I wandered around the square outside watching people set up their telescopes for the night.

At 7, everyone moved to a building to listen to a presentation given by an engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope. It was fascinating, and to see his personal pictures from the astronauts during a mission to fix it and hear them matched up with his stories was amazing (as well as which ones pissed him off :P) Following the speech and presentation, we all headed out to scan the stars. The night was perfect. There were so many different kinds of telescopes focused all over the sky. Most were pointed at Saturn while a few others scanned the nebula in Orion, the double star in the Big Dipper, and a pair of galaxies. I also caught a few satellites passing by. It's absolutely amazing how much is out there. Just taking a pair of binoculars and looking up into a seemingly empty part of the sky reveals so much more. I've always had a mild fascination with space and the stars, but I've never been stargazing before. I've used telescopes and binoculars, but never looked up. If you haven't either, give it a try sometime. It's really amazing what you can see.