Frizzy and Far Away: FRIZZY IN FLORIDA

Day Two

Last night we just ate dinner in one of the resort restaurants and went to bed. Dinner was not good. But it was hilarious watching a grown woman scream loudly and bolt away from her table. There was a frog! It was cute and not very big.

We got up at 7:00 today, which isn’t too early normally, but after our travel day that felt really early. We put our stuff together and hit the road. The drive to the Kennedy Space Center was nice. We paid more tolls, which was fine. We are a lot more familiar with the Orlando, Disney, Kissimmee area now.

Once we got out of the urban area it really felt like driving to the coast in Washington. There aren’t any more towns. We saw a lot of cattle grazing. We also saw many birds. There are so many different kinds of birds, many large, and a lot of them are pointy billed birds. They would be sitting on trees or standing in drainage ditches picking at bugs. We read online that some of the biggest gaitors people see are near Kennedy. I did see a little one in a ditch.

Kennedy was a great day. We saw most of the exhibits and videos. We saw a short IMAX 3D film. We did a shuttle launch simulator. We did the free bus tour, which takes you to as close to the launch pad as you can get, and to the exhibit housing an entire Saturn V rocket and moon landing pod. Tanner and I touched a rock that had come from the moon, which is older than 99.99% of rocks on earth. We liked our overall experience. Many parts of the center are very cheesy. All of it was very kid friendly; at times I wanted something a little more involved or more sophisticated. Some places were dirty or sticky. But even Tanner and I who know a lot about NASA and the history of U.S. space flight found things that were interesting or could get excited about. There were also more foreign languages spoken then other U.S. tourist attraction I think I have been to.

The best part of the day was getting to go the Gantry 39. We saw Endeavour on the pad. It was beautiful but very sad. We really wanted to see the launch. Being that close and missing out on that opportunity was tough. But we were even more surprised at how sad it felt, that shuttle is the embodiment of a whole program that is being dismantled. Every single video or presentation at some point stressed how much of the work they do relies on teamwork. Every time an astronaut launches they trust their lives to the ground crew working at Kennedy, from engineers to mechanics. Many of these men and woman have spent their entire career working on shuttles. Now that program is ending. Thousands of people are going to be laid off. There is no replacement program, Kennedy won’t launch anything for years (all unmanned rockets are launched from Cape Canaveral by the Air Force). On the bus tour we saw a mobile launch pad, and alterations to launch pad B, that were developed for the Constellation program. Bush launched this program, which got really mixed responses. Obama cancelled it, and replaced it with very limited missions in scope and basically no funding for NASA to even achieve these missions. You could hear it in the voices of the docents explaining this, how disappointed they are. NASA is supposed to shrink and basically be an appendage to a private, corporate space program. I can’t imagine how that might affect space flight; what missions we chose, who become astronauts, how much pure research will be discarded for some kind of profit building projects.

Tanner and I readily admit that NASA’s culture is stagnant and their missions financially inefficient. But knowing that America has basically given up on our manned presence in space is heartbreaking. We missed our change at being part of the NASA experience, part of the last amazing 50 years.

On the way back through Titusville we stopped at Dixie Crossroads! This is a restaurant started by local shrimpers. This family found a local shrimp, Rock Shrimp, that has really hard shells that no one eats. The tails are only about an inch and a half long. They cook it, butterfly it, and eat it out of the shell like lobster. By serving this delicacy, and other local, fresh shrimp and fish they became famous. The restaurant is huge now. We had a short wait. They gave us free corn fritters, with powdered sugar on top. They were great. Maybe they could have been lighter, more like hush puppies. We got seasonal Royal Red Shrimp, and Rock Shrimp. Both were amazing. The Rock Shrimp were so light and delicate tasting, coming out of that hard shell. They tasted like a cousin of lobster. The Red Shrimp were the best shrimp we have ever had. They tasted like shrimp, but sweet, and mild, not fishy. They were both perfectly done too. We had a blast. The place is amazingly tacky! We were in the Manatee Room.

Did some grocery shopping, came home, missed the stupid resort internet café again. I will take the laptop with us and stop at a Starbucks tomorrow.

Guess where we decided to go tomorrow! Kennedy Space Center! Tanner wants to see the exhibits we missed. We knew we wanted to spend at least half a day at Cocoa Beach too, which is just farther south on the coast out there. So we can do both tomorrow.

Mock up of the shuttle, you can look inside

You can see Endeavour on Pad A in the background

Vehicle Assembly Building, where they attach the shuttle to the main tank and the two solid fuel rockets. It is one of the largest indoor spaces in the world, inside it is one huge room. It's so big it sometimes has its own climate and can rain inside.