Today we set off to visit Cape Canaveral, for me this has always been a childhood dream. Growing up with the shuttle program, I always wanted to see the place where it all happened.
We set off early for the 1 hour 20 minute drive, this was the first time were we got to see the Florida country side, pretty non descript really quite flat, and very green.
Kennedy Space Centre is on Merit Island which also a nature reserve, home to Alligators, Birds and Manatees.
On arrival at the Space Centre we headed straight for the main tour, this comprised of a visit to a viewing platform appx. 3 miles from launch pad A, which currently has the shuttle on it ready for May 12th launch. We could just about make out the main solid rocket. Bad organising on Jules part as a few days earlier and we could have seen it being moved from the assembly station to the launch pad, her organisation skills must be slipping ;-)
After that we took the bus to the main exhibit all about the Apollo moon landings….Here we got to see the the control room for the Apollo moon landings, and best of all to see a fully assembled Saturn V rocket, the scale of which simply blows you away..
This was too much geeky boy stuff for Ems so we headed back to the main part of the visitor centre so she could experience at least one thrill ride.. The ride is a shuttle launch…unfortunately it didn’t rate well on her ride thrill scale.
The remaining attractions comprised of iMax 3D movies of moon landings, and the international space station, along with various other information related exhibits. There is a rocket garden which comprised of various rocket types e.g Gemini and rockets from the Mercury program.
By about mid day Ems was getting upset that she hadn’t seen any alligators, especially since Jules had spotted a few whilst we were in the bus moving between locations on the tour. So Jules said lets just go and have a look at that stream over there and see if we can spot one, and low and behold there was something floating that looked like a alligator personally I wasn't’ sure but Ems was convinced so I was happy to play along, and then it started to move and then there was no doubt it clearly was a gator. We moved along a bit further and it got better a bit further along we found a young gator and a terrapin in a largish pond, but no manatees. Ems was really pleased.
Finally left the space centre at 18:00 for the drive home…Great day out, Joseph was totally in awe of the scale…and I finally achieved a childhood dream..
