On the road to discovery.

Our window of opportunity for vacation came toward the end of July this year, in between soccer try-outs and soccer camp. We chose to spend a week in Florida visiting relatives and seeing the sights. One of the first stops was Walt Disney World's Epcot[R], near Orlando, and one of the first stops there was TAPPI's "Forests for our Future" exhibit in Innoventions East.

The TAPPI exhibit, which ends this year, is a revamped version of the original. The main attraction is still the "Total Tree-via" game show in which visitors compete to identify objects drawn on a large screen. The game, which features new animation, teaches facts about the forest and paper industries. (My daughter's team won, by the way.) A new feature is a station where visitors can make a sheet of paper. The Disney hosts now give more emphasis to the science of forestry and papermaking, and to the industries' social and ecological benefits.

A few days later we stopped at the Kennedy Space Center, outside of Titusville. The last time I had stayed in the area was to watch a small fireball rise into the sky, carrying the first men to walk on the moon. Our visit coincided with the 33rd anniversary of the safe. return of the Apollo 11 crew. A complete, unused Apollo/Saturn V rocket, suspended horizontally at KSC, and the remnants of the original command center, impress visitors for the massive size of the former, and the crude simplicity of the latter relative to today's technology. (How could they do all that with slide rules, transitors, and vaccuum tubes?) A 3-D Imax movie of the International Space Station makes you feel like you're floating with the astronauts and cosmonauts. Back on Earth, the space lab preparation areas have been dropped from the KSC tour because of the September 11 attacks of last year; shuttle launches are on hold because of" tiny cracks discovered in fuel lines of the space shuttle orbiters. Welding repairs should allow launches to resume this fall.

Our last destination for this trip was St. Augustine, the oldest city in the United States. Here we climbed the 219 winding steps of the lighthouse that was engineered to stay upright in the sandy soil and shoot a beam of light out to sea. We roamed through the Castillo de San Marcos, one of several forts built in the area by the Spanish to protect their claim in the New World. Built from coquina, a conglomerate of shells, its massive walls withstood bombardments that would have demolished stone material commonly used elsewhere. A final stop was the Light-net Museum. More than an art museum, it is a collection of collections housed in the former Hotel Alcazar. The hotel was built by Henry M. Flagler, one of many he built along the Atlantic coast as stops along the railroad to attract the wealthy from up north and turn Florida's Atlantic Coast into America's Riviera.

As usually happens with vacations, this one passed quickly. We did spend a little time at the beach, splashing through the waves and staring at flights of pelicans, but in hindsight, we had ended up on a road of technological exploration. Whether now or old, a common theme was humankind's perpetual effort to push beyond the limits of the known world and turn ideas into reality. Truly, we saw what can he accomplished if you "wish upon a star" and shoot for the moon.

DONALD G. MEADOWS Senior Editor; [e-mail]