Here we are, on the road: We’re in Titusville, Florida

Sunday, May 16, 2010 Lorraine’s report

Well, we came south to Titusville to one of Florida’s premiere RV Resort, The Great Outdoors. Titusville is just across the water from the Kennedy Space Center. TGO is a very nice RV park. There are many beautiful homes here; some right on the golf course or on the lake, some gorgeous lots have a park model home with a big covered shed to pull your rig into. There are many lots that have just a pad and small sheds to store your toys in. You will see every type of RV here, as well as tons of golf carts. There are two restaurants, two swimming pools, a post office, a church, and an RV store. Titusville is just down the road a couple of miles; there are restaurants, a Walmart superstore, a Target, and a bunch of other amenities. Just off to the west is Orlando and all the attractions that city has to offer.

We came to see the Space Shuttle, Atlantis lift off for the last time on its final trip into outer space. It is taking a pay load to the Space Station and they have repairs to make on the station. So, before the scheduled take off, we set out to learn more about the space program.

Fortunately for us, the Kennedy Space Center is a few miles down the road. We headed there one day after I went swimming.

I have to tell you, the weather has been great, in the high 80’s to 90’s in the day, with humidity in the 30-50%, down to the mid 60’s at night. The sun has been out every day, and both Chuck and I have been in shorts, T-shirts and sandals, and we’ve had to put sunscreen on everyday. It’s taken us a bit to adjust to the humidity, but as long as we’re in the shade, we are okay.

The Kennedy Space Center was full of information about the space program. We toured the facility on a bus; there is a fleet of 47 buses that take visitors around to three scheduled stops.

The first stop was at the Launch complex 39 Observation Gantry. This stop included a briefing movie, interactive exhibits and then the climb to the Observation platform for a 360 degree view of the launch area.

The second stop was at the Apollo/Saturn V Center. This stop had a vast amount of information and exhibits about these Space Program.

The third stop was at the International Space Station Center. You walked through exhibits that showed what it was like to live and work on board the space station.

We spent a lot of time waiting on buses to transport you to the next stop; there were a lot of visitors to the center, it being two days until the shuttle launch.

Thursday after I went swimming, we took the day to head to Cocoa Beach to the ocean. We had been to Cocoa Beach about 5 years ago, bringing our daughter, Susy to Disney World for her birthday. We had to buy heavy winter coats at the Ron Jon Surf Shop, since it was so cold; it was freezing cold and very windy out while we were there. We made a stop at Ron Jon’s on this trip for some looking, it was fun, and it was busy as ever.

Friday, launch day, we were up and out by 9:30. We headed towards Kennedy Space Center, along with thousands of other people who had the same idea of watching the launch on the grounds there. Chuck decided to turn around and head back to Titusville after traffic came to a stand still at each light, and only one or two cars made it through each light.

In Titusville, we found a pretty decent viewing spot to watch the launch. It was across the road from the beach, they were charging $20 to park along the beach side. We parked and shortly afterwards all the spots were gone. We ended up waiting from 11:15 to the launch time of 2:20 pm.

While there I went to use the restroom at the gas station just down the road. I was in line for 35 minutes before I got to use the facilities, and the line never went down behind me.

There were thousands of people waiting to see the launch.

Launch time came and we were not disappointed. The sky had cleared considerably, the clouds had disappeared and the word was GO for the launch. The first sign was the large amount of smoke, then the flash of light/fire from the engines firing, then the roar, which we could hear some 4 to 5 miles away, clear across the bay. Atlantis was off, leaving behind a trail of white smoke as she climbed into the air and out of sight.

We thank you Atlantis for your many years of service from October 1985 to May 14, 2010. I was so excited with seeing this miracle, the lifting off of such a wondrous, man made machine, again taking its pay load into space and returning safely back to earth. It truly is wondrous when you think about it. Afterwards, the traffic mess was incredible.

Saturday we headed over to the Astronaut’s Hall of Fame. We spent another afternoon learning about the space program. For instance, there were three programs, each building on the one ahead of it to reach the moon and beyond; the Mercury, the Gemini and the Apollo programs.

The Mercury had many failures before it had success. The Gemini had the first computer on board that helped compute its way back home. Gus Grissom and John Young were the first astronauts to circle the earth three times. Edward White was the first astronaut to walk in space from a Gemini. Walter (Wally) Schirra was the only astronaut to fly in all three of the space program air craft, the Mercury, the Gemini and the Apollo. Edward White, Gus Grissom, and Roger Chaffee gave their lives when a fire broke out in their Apollo 1 space craft on January 27, 1967. John Young holds the record for the most space flights; Gemini 3 & 10, he orbited the moon in Apollo 10, he walked on the moon in Apollo 16, and he commanded two space shuttle missions, STS 1 and STS 9 on Columbia.

I really liked the new exhibit; this one was a clear ball that the attendant showed the different planets/moon on. This ball showed earthquakes, tidal waves and its effects on the water levels around the world. It was fed info from satellites around the world and uploaded to show population growth, air crafts flying from city to city, just a host of useful information.

We will be leaving this area on Monday, and heading north to the eastern sea coast. I have really enjoyed our time here in Florida. There is so much to see and do; we couldn’t do it all, but what we did do, we certainly enjoyed!! Hopefully, we will be back again to do more.

I hope this finds everyone in good health and doing fine. Until next time…..Lorraine

5/16/10 Chuck’s report

Last week we were trying to make a change in plans so we could possibly see a Space Shuttle launch. We made a few phone calls to a person who owns a lot at The Great Outdoors RV and Golf Resort here in Titusville. They had already rented their site out for this week but they called one of their neighbors and got us in touch with them. They were willing to rent us their lot for the week, we wanted to stay for a week in case the shuttle that was scheduled was postponed. So here we are, at TGO until Monday morning.

This is a very nice resort, everything I’ve read give them the highest marks for a campground, all 10s in Woodall's magazine. For the RVers, they have everything from a simple RV site all the way to full sized resort homes with RV ports, all on private lots. We’ve noticed license plates from all over the Eastern portion of the US and talked with lots of folks who winter here. Lots of the RV sites are in a rental pool, rented through the office here; some are also available for rent by the owner also, (that’s the type we found) and many lots are for sale too.

They have all the amenities one would want, including a wood working shop that I didn’t get a chance to check out. They have a large Church, restaurants, RV sales and repair and even their own US Post Office with their own zip code. They have swimming pools, one of which Lorraine went to almost every morning, lots of lakes that are stocked with fish, an 18 hole golf course and of course, lots of wildlife. We’ve seen a bunch of birds, including a painted Bunting and cardinals, squirrels, rabbits, turtles, deer and a bobcat crossing the road. If this place was in Arizona or Southern California, we might consider buying a lot but this area isn’t where we think we would like to put down roots and besides, we aren’t ready for that phase in our lives yet anyhow.

We are about an hour from Orlando and Disney World but decided not to tour there, we were there about 5 years ago and didn’t need the busy, crowded life that is there. We did drive over that way one afternoon to go to a Costco, we haven’t been to one in awhile.

We toured the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral one day, very nice with some of the same stuff we had seen at the Space Center in Huntsville, Alabama a few weeks ago. They have much more information here about the astronauts, however, along with more info about each of the space programs. They said they have up to 20,000 visitor on a busy day, lucky for us it wasn’t that busy when we were there. Looks like it might be a place to get a good paying job if we were to stay in the area for any length of time. The whole Space Center visitor’s center is completely supported by the visitors, no tax dollars are used to fund the facilities.

Even though we lived though a lot of the space program, I forgot (or never knew) most of it. We started with the Mercury, then the Gemini followed by the current Apollo. The Apollo program started in 1961 when President Kennedy said we would land a person on the moon and return them back to Earth within that decade. The Apollo program didn’t get off to a very good start, three astronauts lost their lives on the launch pad during a test run of Apollo 1, the next manned flight wasn’t until Apollo 7. Apollo 11 made the first landing on the moon in 1969, Apollo 13 was scheduled to land on the moon but had troubles on the way up and didn’t make the moon but they did get everyone back safely. There were 6 successful landing on the moon and a total of 12 people have walked on the moon.

After 1975 they switched to using the shuttle and most of these flights have been to/from the Space lab and the International Space Station. There are only three launches remaining in its schedule before the program ends, Atlantis was scheduled to make it’s last flight on Friday, the Discovery and Endeavor will make their last flights later this year.

Although the next program is for us to go into deep space and finally to Mars, there is talk the government may shut down the whole space program. I sure don’t want to see that happen even though it does cost a LOT of money to keep it going. I think it would be a bad thing for our astronauts to have to hitchhike a ride from the Russians or Chinese! Now if we could somehow turn it over to private enterprise and keep it in the US, that might be OK. Guess we will have to wait and see how it turns out over the next couple of years.

We took an afternoon jaunt to visit Coca Beach, home of “I Dream of Jeanie”. We didn’t see Jeanie though, bummer. We did go to Ron Jon’s surf shop, last time we were there was in Feb. five years ago and we needed to buy heavy winter coats, it was that cold. This time, however, we were in shorts, tee shirts and sandals, much better. We also stopped by the beach there, very nice with lots of access.

On Friday morning we checked and the Atlantis Shuttle launch was still a “GO”. We drove out towards Kennedy Space Center but the highway was a parking lot (we moved about 2 miles in 45 minutes) and I hate driving in traffic. We decided to take the advice we were given to see the launch from the beach right in Titusville. We found a place to park right across from the beach (for free instead of $20 to park on the beach side) and waited. We were about 6 miles away from the launch site vs. the four miles we could have been at Kennedy, no big deal.

What a mad house of people, must have been over 10,000 people in our area of three blocks. Lorraine walked over to a gas station about a block away and had to wait over 30 minutes to use their restroom. Then the tour buses started coming in, letting more people join in and add to the crowd.

The launch was schedule to go off at 2:20 pm, by then we were ready for it. I was listening to the radio and heard about a ball bearing they found just before the launch at the launch site. There was some talk about postponing the launch until they figured out where it came from but made the decision to continue with the countdown.

At exactly 2:20 we could see the ignition and lift off but it took about 90 seconds for the sound wave boom to reach us. The flight went off without a hitch and they are now on a 12 day mission to the Space Station. With only two more launches scheduled before they stop this program, we were glad to see this one. Guess we can mark that one off our bucket list.

Yesterday we decided to visit the Astronaut Hall of Fame, a fairly new attraction near the Space Center. Once again we were treated to enough information to overload us. Not knowing what to expect, I figured we would be there an hour or two, not the four hours we stayed.

They have one exhibit that we both really liked. They have a clear ball hanging and 4 projectors that they use to cover the ball. They can make it appear as any of the planets and moons. They also have lots of information about the Earth they can show on it. For example, they showed the 2004 & 2005 hurricanes as they built up and moved across the Atlantic, including Katrina hitting New Orleans. The also showed, via colored areas, the changing of the temperature of the oceans in the last 30 years. They also had a program to show the Earth’s population and growth since the time of Christ. One of programs showed all the airplane movement in the world, hour by hour for the last 24 hours. Boy, you can sure see the difference between the number of flights during daylight compared to night time. They can show Tsunami predictions, lightening strikes around the world, earthquake action and ocean currents.

For the programs, they use any information available to them. For the planets and space, a lot of the pictures were from the Hubble Telescope. Many of the other programs were built for information for presentations by students and government folks. I didn’t catch the name of this exhibit but if you ever get a chance to see it, I think it would be well worth your time. I plan on adding a few examples of what we saw in the picture section later so you can see what I mean.

The weather here has been just short of fabulous, a bit warm for us with mid 90s during the day and dropping to the high 60s at night. The humidity, as has been the case everywhere here in Florida, is higher than we like and that makes it feel hotter. There is usually a slight breeze, more like a wind at the beach, which helps to keep it bearable. We do run the air conditioners on auto and that helps with both the heat and humidity.

Watching the launch wasn’t in our long range plans and spending a week here will cause us to cut some of our other stops short. We are still planning on heading up the East coast but will only make one or two day stops to visit the areas. We still plan on being in Gloucester, VA. over Memorial weekend and Hersey, PA. over the 4th of July week. Other than that, we would like to spend some time in Washington DC to see the sights and Memorials there between the two holidays. After that, I guess we will turn and head West, need to go back to Bellingham for our annual doctor visits.

And now for some pictures of our stay here.

Pictures of the resort where we are staying.

Some of different type of lots.

Our site and with our rig in place. Notice we didn’t back all the way in, wanted to be able to put the satellite up.

The one on the right is right behind us, the palm trees grow wild here.

Kennedy Space Center.

Many of the early astronauts drove Sting-Rays, here’s one.

Lots of information about all the flights, especially Apollo 13, A Successful Failure”.

On the way to Coco Beach for the day.

Cruise ships near Coca Beach and a palm leaf thatched roof on a private boat.

Lorraine wading in the Atlantic Ocean at Coco Beach.

The crowd waiting for the launch in Titusville.

These show people standing in the median in the middle of the road as the beach is pretty full already. We are just behind them along the road. Lots of people!