With Dan working long hours on the Lombard project and Madeline not being able to plan vacations very well at her work, we decided that we’d spend 2019 doing shorter, more spur of the moment long weekends. One such weekend was to the Space Coast, primarily to visit the Kennedy Space Center. We stayed in Cocoa Beach and even visited a couple other local beaches.

Nasa/space coast: 05/09/19-05/12/19

We stayed in Cocoa Beach the night before, having a great meal at Pompano Grill. We got up early, though, and drove to Merritt Island and the Space Center. The most obvious first thing visible was the Rocket Garden, with its towering rockets. We bypassed that at first, though, heading to see a 3D movie about the journey into space.

We read that the Atlantis exhibit would get crowded, so we went there next. We saw a brief film about the space shuttle and then suddenly the screen disappeared and the actual shuttle appeared. We walked in and saw the amazing space ship. We were in awe of the machine.

The exhibit also included history of other shuttles, and had a section of the door recovered from the Challenger explosion. It was all very fascinating, and we could have stayed there for hours to experience it all.

We took a bus ride to the launch pads, passing by the massive rocket-building building. We saw a crawler that carries the rockets to the launch pads, and learned of the current SpaceX program.

We also learned about the Apollo missions, including seeing the launch room replicated to exactly how it was on July 20, 1969. They even had a simulation of the touchdown on the moon.

Going to Cocoa Beach meant that we had to visit the famous Ron Jon store.

The next morning we drove up towards New Smyrna Beach and saw this fascinating treehouse by the road, so we stopped there and had lunch.

We continued to Apollo Beach and stayed there for a while before moving to the other side of the Canaveral National Seashore and going to Playlinda Beach. I figured “when in Rome” on the two beaches in order to relieve some anxiety over the Lombard project. Playlinda is a beach where people go to watch rocket launches.

We ended our day going out to the Cocoa Beach Pier, enjoying some nice drinks out on the Atlantic.