NARAM 58- Travel and Sunday Night Meeting

Springfield, Missouri in the summer is hot, humid, beautiful, and this year it is where NARAM (National Association of Rocketry Annual Meet) 58 is being held, which makes it fun!  My dad, my sister, and I made the drive out to Missouri and made it to the event hotel around midday on Friday.  Missouri looks a lot like Pennsylvania in Springfield, but around other areas, it's really flat.

The Lamplighter Inn is a nice event hotel for this year.  The staff is really nice and helps in anyway they can to accommodate all of our needs.  The rooms don't have a lot of storage space in the double bed rooms, but it's very doable.  For the first time ever I have taken advantage of the build room.  I never knew what a fantastic place it is!  My D Glider is coming along a little slower than I intended, but it's more fun piecing it together while talking to other modelers that are doing last minute builds and adjustments as well.

Saturday afternoon, my mom joined us in Springfield and Sunday morning we decided to checkout the field and walk down vendor row.  The field here is fantastic!  We are on a big farm field with lots of cows all around us.  There were a lot of vendors on the field on Sunday and lots of locals were taking advantage of the Fly-It-Take-It tent.

After a quick trip to the field, we decided it was time for a little tourist attraction trip... yes you can do that at a NARAM!  We went to Fantastic Caverns and explored their really cool caves.  The caves are 60 degrees Fahrenheit all year round, so it was literally cool.  There was a lot of history with the caves and it was a really interesting and fun experience.  Fantastic Caverns has one of the only driving tours through a cave in the world.  If you get a chance to go, you definitely should check it out.

My teammate and I took the afternoon on Sunday to decorate our PMC (Plastic Model Conversion) before turn in and had fun with decorating "The Bunny" for Open Spot Landing and a G Streamer model that our other teammate sent and swore would be decorated before he sent it.... Mike this is what happens when you leave Bubbles and Sparkles to decorate your models.

Sunday night was the competitors' briefing and scale turn in.  The briefing was pretty short and answered a lot of questions about the field and the rules for first time competitors.  There were reminders about rules and requirements for scale and some of the altitude events, which led to some hole drilling for our E Scale Altitude model before turn in.

NARAM 58 is going really well so far and has been a lot of fun.  Competition started today with a couple of hitches with weather.  We will have the Town Hall Meeting tonight starting at 7 pm central time.  Tuesday is the Cannon Benefit Auction at 7 pm, Wednesday is the presentation on SQS at 6 pm and Research and Development for A and C divisions from 8-10 pm.The NARAM 58 website is staying updated with the announcements about the field, flying, and other events, check there if you have any questions: http://www.naram58.org/.  Chris Taylor has been taking amazing pictures of everything going on and got a video of last night's meeting, so check out his website, NARAMLive, for pictures of the fun and maybe some videos later too!

I'll try to do more updates throughout the week.  Until next time, fly high, stay safe, and have fun!