36 years on
36 years ago, give or take a few hours, the Apollo 11 lunar module touched down on the moon. My family was driving east to New Hampshire for our summer vacation at my grandfather's summer camp in Maine, but we turned the radio on and pretended that our little dolls, in their cardboard box spaceship, were landing on the moon before Apollo 11 could land. I dimly remember watching the television on the Holiday Inn we were staying at (somewhere in Ohio; it took the family three days to get from LaCrosse to East Rochester -- for some reason my parents didn't want to do 995 mile deathmarches with three screaming children in the backseat of our car) as they showed Armstrong hopping down from the lander.
I don't remember Armstrong's famous comment. At nine years old, the moon didn't seem as much of a big deal as it does now.