(no subject)

I'm going to try and remember and write about all the stuff I did on the trip to Florida while it's still in relatively coherent form in my brain.

The four of us (my parents, barton_fender and farm_cat, and my brother, akreaveter) connected at their house right after I got off of work on Friday. We stopped at Toppers on the way out of town to redeem our coupons for free food. It turned out that I'd brought the wrong one; oops.

We drove south from there. I-94 to Indiana, then I-65 from Gary through Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee. I thought of isolde_deely as we drove through Louisville. Then I think it was I-75 from Chattanooga through Georgia and down toward Orlando in Florida, near the house that vandringar was kindly letting us stay. We finally got there about ten o' clock on Saturday. Having left Toppers around seven-thirty on Friday, we were on the road for over twenty-four hours. Ouch!

We did stop a few times, including an hour or more at Raccoon Mountain where I got a big raccoon crossing sign for moiracoon. There was a stop at a pretty roadside rest area near the Nickajack reservoir by Chattanooga too, so there was a good bit of dawdling. Anyway, Van left the house keys with us and chatted for an hour, and then he left and we all slept.

The next morning, Van met up with us for a day of Florida fun. We visited his brother who, between his pets and his rescue animals, has a bunch of fun critters. We got to pet and play with wolves. I got nibbled by a very enthusiastic wolf who licked and bit at my beard. We saw his tortoise and lizards. We looked at fire ant mounds (creepy little things).

We moved on from there and went to the Kennedy Space Center. I wasn't sure what to expect, and unfortunately the info materials they handed out at the entrance didn't do the best job of explaining. I feel like it's only now that I've been through it that I have a sense of where things are and what I want to see. But that aside, it's a great experience and was worth the kind of hefty entrance fee. The observation gantry for the shuttle launch pad was closed for the launch, but we went to a building with a whole Saturn V rocket in it. Outside the building were bleachers for observing the launch (limited to people with special launch tickets) and a scientist who was involved with some experiments on the upcoming flight. I listened to him talk for a time, then went back in and looked through the room with artifacts including the actual Apollo 14 capsule.

We got there late and it was coming up on closing time after a couple hours. From there, we drove to Orlando. There's an alligator/mini-golf place that Van has family connections to. We were all treated to the chance to hold an alligator! It was about three feet long and the alligator wrangler had taped his mouth closed, and it was nifty-keen! (I actually kind of wanted to play mini-golf too 'cause I'm a mini-golf junkie.)

After alligator-time, the five of us went to an Ethiopian restaurant nearby. I, for one, had never eaten Ethiopian food before. The presentation is very neat; everyone places their orders and they all come back in piles on a great big communal plate. There's no silverware; instead, there are baskets of bread that you unroll and use to scoop up the various dishes, putting the whole thing in your mouth. I tried Van's steak tartare, a sip of my mom's honeywine, and even the coffee. For the first time, I smelled coffee that was really pleasant as it was prepared next to our table. The actual taste of the drink was horribly bitter and unpleasant to me, but Moira and Mocha should be proud that I gave it a try, right?

After dinner, we got back to the house and fell off to sleep. It had been a long day and I wasn't caught up on sleep from the drive.

I wasn't going to get caught up that night either. We awoke about three in the morning to drive out to Titusville for the 6:30 launch. Factoring in an hour or so to get ready, an hour or so to make the drive, and an hour or so to find a spot, we were just about perfect. We were in place and I had the tripod set up about fifteen minutes before the launch. There was quite a crowd all along the Titusville shore, so we didn't get to Spaceview Park (where there is live audio feed from mission control), but we had a fine view across the shore toward the launch pad, about ten miles away.

That seems like quite a distance, and the launch gantry was a scant fingernail tall on the horizon. Spotlights blazed all around the pad with an intense light that shot far up into the pre-dawn sky in all directions. We didn't have a way to listen to the countdown, so it took me by surprise for a moment when the flames from the solid rocket boosters suddenly created an early dawn. I tried to get a couple pictures (I'd already pre-focused the camera and attached the remote shutter release so I wouldn't have to look through the viewfinder) but after a couple shots I stopped and watched through the binoculars I'd brought. I wanted to see it happening instead of playing at adjusting camera settings.

It was only a few minutes from pillar of flame at the horizon to new star rushing through the sky. I passed the binoculars around to the rest of my family as we watched her go. I jumped and screamed and yelled and, when it was done, I cried. It was everything I hoped it would be and more.

We all stayed at the shore for another hour or so as the sun rose over Titusville. The colors in the sky were beautiful. I can't remember when I last saw a sunrise that was so pretty. I don't know if that's because they're special near the ocean, or if I just haven't seen enough sunrises. I took a few pictures of the sky, the beach, the clouds, and the people. Then we left for the house.

The traffic was unbelievable. It was like driving back from the Lake Michigan shore after July 4th fireworks, but ten times as bad. It took a few hours to get back to the house, during which I saw steam from the hood and found that the oil cap had somehow come off. Oops! Fortunately it was still in there. We got back to the house with the intent of napping for a while, but in the end we just had some lunch and headed out to connect with Van again. There was too much to do down there to sleep!

We met up with him at his place, which I might describe as a museum where you can touch the artifacts. Without going into detail about things that aren't mine, I was awed at some of the things he let me handle. I was also reacquainted with the human skull I sent him a while back!

From there we drove out to see a plant nursery; Farm Cat wanted a plant to bring home. I had a fun time wandering about the place, even though I really don't know much about plants. I liked the venus flytraps and the fruit trees. The air smelled wonderful around all the greenery.

We proceeded out to a spot I found on Roadside America, the Turnbull Ruins. They're a large foundation of coquina blocks overlooking the water in New Smyrna Beach. I had a fun time climbing around and into them. Unfortunately, while I was trying to get a shot of an overhang from underneath, the shutter on my camera went out on me. I've seen a lot of examples online of this happening with a 20D, so I knew it right away. At this point, with the other issues that have developed on the body, I think I need to replace it. I just have to figure out how I'm going to manage to do that.

We had dinner that night at Cici's! I love Cici's to an unhealthy degree. *bounces* And then we drove to Canaveral National Seashore, a few miles up the shore from the cape and conveniently near the ruins. We climbed the boardwalk to the top of one of the largest oyster shell middens in the state. It's about fifty feet tall, and covered in pretty plants. I was boggled by the sheer volume of oyster shells in this great mound on the beach, and I thought about the long years of native people's activities that built it up.

It was starting to get dark and we spent sunset playing in the ocean on the opposite side of the island from the mound. First in the park itself, then a little way up the coast on a public beach after the national park closed for the night. We stood in the surf as the sun set behind the island. Mom and I ran around the beach, me chasing her like the excited dog I felt like there. The slope of the beach is amazingly shallow, and waves swept across ten or fifteen feet of sand. The colors were out of this world, and I wished very much to have a camera and a short monopod to rest in the sand and shoot landscapes looking to the north over the beach, just above the water. The ocean shore has kind of spoiled me for Lake Michigan. There are so few stretches of natural shoreline near Kenosha and Racine.

We drove back to Van's place and said our in-person goodbyes as we got back in our car. We got back to the house well after dark and slept like logs. I still hadn't caught up on sleep from the way down, and we were leaving early tomorrow to go to the Kennedy Center one more time.

We were up around seven on Tuesday morning (Dad was up at 6 to make some food) in hopes of getting to the space center when it opened. That didn't happen, but we did get there around ten thirty I think. We ended up staying until about five o' clock. Again, not what we intended, but well worth it.

We took the tour bus to the observation gantry by the shuttle launch pads. It would have been neat to see Discovery standing there, but even empty they were a wonderful sight. There was also a space shuttle main engine on display there. I spent a while looking through binoculars at the pads, the VAB, and everything else. We went on to the next stop on the bus circle, a building dedicated to the International Space Station. There were mockups of several of the modules, and an overlook into the clean room where work on many of the modules is done. Neat stuff!

Back at the area around the entrance, we rode the shuttle launch simulator; it's a motion simulation ride that replicates a shuttle launch. That was a lot of fun, and even turned us ninety degrees to vertical as we sat waiting for lift off. We went to the gift shop, of course (I bought a bumper sticker!) and we saw the memorial to astronauts who've died in the line of duty. I didn't feel quite as much of a connection there as I did at Arlington cemetery at the quiet stones memorializing the shuttle crews. Probably because of the people. But it was good to see them.

Finally we left for home. We arrived in Kenosha after about twenty four hours on the road, including some rain storms in northern Indiana and an awful traffic jam in Chicago around rush hour (go figure). I'm home now, and back to real life. But only for as long as I have to live it. I'm already itching to get on the road again.

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Mom and I at the STS-131 Launch

© Stormdog 2010