I’ve written before that I’ve wanted to become a member of the Explorers Club in Manhattan since I was a child and that I was able fulfill that dream last year.

Last Saturday was the 106th annual dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, and the  theme was exploring the universes out there.   As before, people from all over the world attended this exciting event.

The M.C. for the dinner was Dan Aykroyd who did a funny SNL conehead impersonation when he introduced the the chairs of the event,  astronaut Leroy Chiao and award-winning computer game developer Richard Garriott.  During the live auction portion of the event , Dan did a very cool thing- he successfully bid $6,000.00 for two seats on a Zero-G weightless experience and then gave the seats to two boy scouts who were helping out.

Each of the live auction items would  have been a trip of a lifetime, but they were way too expensive for me to even think of bidding on. I’ll discuss them all in a later post so that we can at least dream about them.

The honorees for the event included Steven W. Squyres, whose research specialty concerns the history and water distribution of water on Mars and the possible existence and habitability of a liquid water ocean on Europa.

Donald C. Johanson who produced the groundbreaking discovery fossil find of the Lucy skeleton was also honored, and Stephen Hawking’s daughter, Lucy, presented a video of her father greeting the attendees of this event.

It was a great event.