The Great Western Journey part 13--Wait a Minute!

We stayed in the general vicinity Sunday morning because there was a planned group ranger talk at Minuteman Missile NHS. The talk was at the site of the missile silo and I was amazed that you can look directly down the tube into where the missile is still housed. According to the ranger, the clear dome is to prove to the spy satellites that this is decommissioned and incapable of being launched! It was hot, even early in the morning but so worth the trip out to the site!

This layout is based on a November class I took (sorry can't show the sketch). I wish I could show the sketch as the original layout had more vertical photos on the right. But in practice, the squares created a middle section that was very flexible on photo placement. Those squares also provide a great base for sticker clusters to decorate the page. The green colors really had to do with what paper I had with me as I put this together while at a crop away from home!

At the end of the talk we all posed for a group photo. I think the ranger took it for us!

For this page,  I wanted to highlight that big photo of our group. I chose this pinned layout as a base. Now that pin has a lot of circles across the bottom but the idea is that you want to frame the bottom and have some banners on the top. When looking for a theme for the pages I decided that I would move toward a patriotic theme and all of my following pages for this park follow that idea. The large photo allowed me to use up 2 scraps of paper--one at the top and one at the bottom--to frame the photo. I did create a small border along the bottom but the paper with the star print helps create the "cluster" in the original page idea.

After the ranger talk, we went to Wall Drug for brunch and then to the visitor center. The building is fairly new so the "rusty" look of the main entrance is intentional. The most eye-opening display was the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the world as demonstrated by the blue and orange towers (right page below). Many of the club members were there as well and I caught Jennifer's Junior Ranger swearing-in ceremony.

This layout was based on a class that I took and I cannot show the sketch. The main thrust was the pair of borders--one horizontal on the left and a vertical one on the right. I kept with the patriotic theme and was able to use up a paper pack that was pretty old. The border punch on red cardstock pulled the 2 pages together.