Day 4: Swimming With The Rainbows

Day 4: Swimming With The Rainbows

Good morning. We slept in this morning til almost 9! We headed down for breakfast hoping there was still bacon. We heard someone say they have bacon about once a week and it was going to be today. They had good seasoned potatoes and lots of bacon, Brian got them and some eggs. I got a waffle today I love them so much :) After breakfast we went over to buy some more sunblock since we seem to be using a lot of it. We got back and headed down to the beach for about an hour.

We then headed out to Kennedy Space Center. It was only about a 35 minute drive up to the center. We took a bus ride tour. It drove around to show us the VAB (Vehicle Assembly Building), Mission Control, and got to see the Crawler which moves a max speed of 2mph without a load and a max of 1mph when it is moving the rockets. It was pretty awesome seeing such huge machines.

The first stop the bus made was the Launch Complex 39 Observatory Gantry. From there we could see the old launch pad and the new one they are working on building still. I zoomed way in to get a good picture of it. The view from top of the 4 story building was beautiful. There was so much land.
 

We got back on the bus and the next stop was the Apollo / Saturn V Center. We watched a short video and then got to see what the old mission control room looked like. They said it was the actual room they used back for the first several launches. When the shuttle lifted off they actually had the window behind/above us glow red and shake loudly. It was cool watching it.
 

We left that room and came into a large room showing one of the shuttles. It was so huge. They do not look that big when you are watching a launch on tv. It was cool seeing them up close. There was so much there to see. A lot of the suits they used to wear too were there. Still all covered in moon dust. They also have moon samples suspended in a glass pyramid for us to see.

The bus then took us back to the Kennedy Space Center complex and we waited for a long time to go into the simulator. We had to put all out stuff in lockers since you were not allowed to bring anything with you. After waiting for a while we were allowed upstairs and continued to wait for what seemed like forever, but was probably like 25 minutes. They took us to a room and showed us some more of the launch videos and even had some smoke/steam come from the floor as the shuttle took off. After this video (about 3-4 minutes) we walked into another room and waited to go into the simulator (a 4 minute wait). We have no pictures of any of this because we had to stow them in the lockers. We were finally allowed to go into the simulator. I was a littler nervous cause I did not know what to expect. We got in our seats and got buckled in and were ready to go. The launch simulator started and we were moved to a 90 degree angle facing straight up like we were about to take off. They started the count down and began to shake us. Our faces felt like jello. My thoughts was I felt like my face would have looked like the runners in the olympics when they run so fast their faces shake. After we got into orbit they stopped the shaking and had us pointed down a little. At the end we checked out the gift shop and headed back to Cocoa Beach.

For dinner tonight we stopped at the Shark Pit, located in the Sheraton Hotel. It was really cool having the fish tank in the restaurant. It even had a shark in it! I tired so hard to get a good picture of him but he was never on the top he always rode the bottom of the tank and people were always in my way. On the way out I got a good one of him.

Just before sunset we saw a .... RAINBOW :) At this time we headed back to the beach!!

And of course the rainbow was still there when we got there. ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE SKY DOUBLE RAINBOW! We were swimming and the rainbow was with us the whole time. The sun was setting and the clouds were glowing and the rainbow was still there. It was sweet. Brian also rode the boogie board for a little bit. Then we sat in the water letting the waves move us around. It was cool. Afterwards we sat on our towels and soaked in the moment. The lights on the large ships came on and it made me think of christmas lights on the water.

The sunset was colorful and it started to get dark quicker as the sun was already set. The beach was peaceful. A few families were down there too. We headed back up to our room to chill for the rest of the night.