Cape Canaveral and Orlando

Before going to Orlando to attend the APS meeting, we went to Cape Canaveral. A Space Shuttle launch was scheduled for 1 AM on Monday morning, so we arrived there on the previous Saturday night and camped for two nights. The campground was right on the ocean and was one of the prime spots for viewing space shuttle launches. Kennedy Space Center (KSC), which is the NASA part of Cape Canaveral, has an excellent visitor center so we spent the day there on Sunday, while waiting for the Shuttle Launch.
 

A replica of the Space Shuttle. It was neat to walk inside and see what it looked like. Pretty tight quarters for up to seven astronauts on one flight.
 

The visitor center provides a bus tour of parts of the NASA operations area at KSC. Because of the upcoming Space Shuttle launch, some of the areas were off-limits to visitors. So we only got a view from the bus of some things. This is the Vehicle Assembly Building, which is where they attach the shuttle to the booster rocket and external fuel tank. The entire assembly leaves this building in a vertical orientation and is moved to the launch site. This building is said to be the largest building in the world in terms of internal volume.

There are several canals such as these on the KSC grounds. As we rode by in the bus we saw alligators in some of them.

This alligator and turtle co-exist in a pond on the grounds of the visitor center. Fortunately for the visitors, this pond was surrounded by a concrete wall, so the visitors weren't likely to become dinner for the alligator.

Shortly after midnight on Monday morning we headed for the beach to watch the Space Shuttle launch, which was set to go up at 1 A.M. On the way there we learned that the launch had been indefinitely postponed. So we missed the launch after all.

We then headed for Orlando so Gil could attend the APS plasma physics meeting. By coincidence, Pat and Ed Manning were in Orlando at the same time, so Nancy spent a couple of days with Pat working on genealogy. Orlando didn't really appeal to us. It is dominated by the big theme parks, Disneyworld, Seaworld, etc., but there doesn't seem to much else if you are not into that sort of thing.

We camped at the Orlando City campground, which had a wild turkey that lived in the area.  A woman camped across from us said that the turkey came around most every day - perhaps because she was feeding it. The campground was next to a small lake, which had four alligators, according to one of the park staff. Fortunately, there was a chain link fence between us and the lake, but sometimes people would carelessly leave the gate open. Consequently we took a flashlight with us whenever we headed to the bathroom after dark, and carefully scanned the area ahead and around us. Fortunately, we didn't have an unexpected encounter with an alligator.
 

Next stop - St. Augustine on our way north to Madison. Click here to go to the next page.