It turns that my work wasn’t going to be as hectic as I thought it was going to be so Marla and I decided to pick up some tickets to the latest shuttle launch. There aren’t many more shuttle missions left so we figured if we were going to watch a shuttle launch we had better do it sooner rather than later.

We got into Orlando at 5am on a red-eye flight from LA. We had a great breakfast at Waffle House (a luxury to us Los Angelenos from the south). We showed up at Kennedy Space Center at about 7:30am, two hours before they opened because we couldn’t check into our hotel yet. We got an awesome parking space, let me tell you! We checked out the Visitor Center there until about 3pm when the lack of sleep started catching up to us and checked into our hotel.

Two days later, the launch went without a hitch. They actually moved the launch day ahead by 24 hrs to get the launch done before bad weather rolled in. Luckily we were watching TV at the right time and didn’t miss the announcement. The launch itself was brighter than Marla and I expected. The solid rocket boosters are basically the color of the sun, but not so bright you can’t look right at it. After the boosters are done you can see a blue pixel in the sky that are the main engines taking the shuttle into orbit. The whole event was over in a matter of minutes, but was very exciting!

We spent 3 days at Kennedy Space Center in central Florida (where humidity migrates during the spring and summer) before heading to Disney World.