Endeavour ... still with the British "u"

Well, that may be the closest I ever get to a Divine Experience.
Tonight, Brian, Sydney and I drive out to Ellington Field to view the space shuttle Endeavour. The shuttle is on a cross-country trip to Los Angeles (its final home will be the California Science Center), and it's making some scheduled fly-overs and a couple stops. It was supposed to leave Florida yesterday and spend two days here in Houston, but weather prohibited a take-off yesterday, so Endeavour is only here for tonight, and leaving in the morning. Seeing the shuttle only means driving in your car, and walking to the tarmac where it's sitting.
According to my phone's mapping function, the drive is only 27 miles, but 42 minutes in time. With the traffic, it took us two-and-a-half hours to get there. The excitement was only heightened by the little amount of gas in the car and the slight detour to a gas station. We parked in a grassy lot behind a VFW lodge, and walked across the highway and then onto the airport property. We figure the walk, from the car to the shuttle viewing area, was more than a mile. Sydney was a trooper, and hoofed it with us.
Once we entered the viewing area, we could get as close as 100 feet from the airplane and shuttle atop it. Honestly, I could probably sit along the ropes and stare at the thing all night. I was close to tears when we first rounded the corner to see it, and I swear, I took way too many pictures of it. (That's one there.) But it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It'll never be in Houston again, and it will probably never be in this condition again. (I imagine the Science Center will make some exterior changes for the visitors.) And we got so close!
I missed my calling. Brian said that he's always really surprised by how much I really want to be an astronaut. "You didn't want to make the extra effort, but you certainly wanted to do it," he observed. Well, sure, math and science were never my thing, and apparently, you need both to be a space-going person, but still, they (meaning NASA) should have just known that I would make a good math-adjacent astronaut.
I love me some space shuttle though, and tonight did me just fine.