Heartlife

Road Trip

One of the things we do at Heartlife to continue the students' learning and experience of life is to take a three to four-week road trip at the end of each school year.

Here are some representations of last year's trip.


Last year the students traveled down through California. They helped raise money, plan, and provide the meals for the whole trip.

Here is what one of the second year students said of the road trip last year.

"The road trip was a amazing groth experience everyone became family and I learned more then I ever would have in normal school. It was a life changing experience!"

As part of continuing the learning experience on the road, students were divided into groups to complete a project. Such as a podcast, photo album, video, and blog entries. These helped parents at home keep track of what the group was up to.

Here is one of the blog entries written while the students were on the road


13 of April 2008 Day 7 NASA

Goodmorning everyone... It's 4 AM and it is time to take a shower and pack the bus. The stars are still out and they are beautiful. So bright in this wide open country. I could just lay out there for hours. You could see the hills out in the distance along with the silhouettes of the big bushy trees. Truly amazing. After getting the bus all loaded up, we were off to denny's! I was soooo worn out and tired, and since we had a two hour drive... I thought I might just.... zzzzzz. So, here we are at denny's. I am going to get the "Fabulous French Toast Platter" and a cappuccino. While we are waiting for the food... Tessa and I decide to balance spoons on our faces. I could get one on my nose, my chin, and almost on my cheeks. Some day, I am going to break the world record. Hehehe. :p We are now headed out to NASA!!! Once again, I fall asleep in the bus.

When we arrived at NASA, we were greeted by Nina, Kevin's cousin... she then introduced us to a guy named Joe. Joe is an engineer who works for the wind tunnel area of the NASA campus. He took us on a tour through the wind tunnel and the control room. The biggest wind tunnel in the world is held at that NASA station. It is 80x120 feet in the test section, has 6, 40 ft (diameter) fans with 15 blades per fan. The electric motors draw 106 mega watts which is enough to power 100,000 homes and produce 135,000 horse power (200 NASCAR engines) that pulls the wind through the tunnel at over 200 mph. The electric bill is over $1,000,000 a month, and that is with a special deal from the electric company. Wow is all I can say. They were giant.

After taking a tour in the wind tunnel building... we headed out to the cafeteria. I had a pastrami sub, and a huge salad. Yum. We even got to talk with an engineer that designed the heat shields for re-entering the earths atmosphere. It was very interesting to see such a great amount of people working on separate things then putting them all together to perform a great task.

After lunch, we headed over to the VMS (vertical motion simulator). It could go 100 feet up vertically, about 80 feet horizontally, and could also go forwards, backwards, and the box itself could simulate the pitch, yaw, and drag. It was very cool to see real astronauts in training. The simulator was very realistic! It was really amazing.

So, now we are off to a Monteray high school where we are staying in the gym. The stars are great here too. Really bright, especially when you lay out in the field with the cool breeze blowing over my face. Truly amazing.

One of the other groups was responsible for making a video diary of our trip.