Is it summer?

We’ve moved on to Cocoa Beach, Florida.  There’s a beautiful big beach and the weather has really started to improve.  We were quite surprised by the crowds, both on the beach and in the water.

Even with the crowds, the beach is nice and big…so different than Daytona, which is just about an hour north.  We’re already talking about how hard it’s going to be to leave the beach…we’ve gotten use to hearing the waves and the beautiful vast views.

Our routine has been working in the morning (I help Jason with various tasks for his websites), then we have lunch, and hit the beach for a hour or two each afternoon.  Every day we’ve taken books to the beach, but somehow we never seem to read.  I’m happy people watching and taking it all in.  It’s a nice break because in the late afternoon we work more before making dinner.

Kennedy Space Center

After a few weeks in Daytona, we happily left in the middle of bike week.  Our nice quiet beach had turned loud and obnoxious.  We packed up and headed to Kennedy Space Center.  Surprisingly, it is not run by the government, but contracted out to a private company.  You could tell by the $46 basic admission price!  It had more of an amusement park feel than the seriousness of space program visitor center.  However, I do have to confess the space shuttle launch simulator was pretty cool.  There are two different Imax theaters and several different activities for kids.  Not at all what we expected…which for me was more like the Smithsonian Air & Space museum.

There were several other tours you could take, of course for an additional price.  One thing our ticket did include which we didn’t have time for was  a bus ride to the observation gantry of the shuttle pads and a building with a Saturn V rocket.  Our tickets are good for seven days, so we plan to return to see those parts.

We did get to go inside a space shuttle, but I think it must just be a replica because as far as we could figure there were only five shuttles – two were lost, Discovery just flew its last mission and there are two more launches.  Also made me realize that the shuttle at the Smithsonian is not real – for some reason I assumed it was.

The shuttle replica at KSC.

This is the cargo bay.

  

And the famous Canada arm.

Ponce de Leon Light House

The tallest lighthouse in Florida just happens to be down the beach from Daytona, so we went to check it out.  You can climb all the way to the top.

The stairs can make you feel quite dizzy.

There’s a nice view of the inlet from the top.

No surprise, Jason didn’t even want to come out.  He’s been talking about going parasailing, but I decided since he wouldn’t even walk around the light house, there’s no way he’s going parasailing – at least not with me.  I don’t want to be up there with him when he freaks out!

The ocean

We’ve been “living” at the ocean for about two months now.  It’s amazing how much the ocean can change from day to day.  Not really sure why, but for several days the water came up really far on the beach in Daytona.  It wasn’t simply a high tide, because the water level stayed up for several days.

As you can see the water comes up nearly to the pool at our hotel.

It didn’t leave much room for walking on the beach.  They even had to close the “traffic lanes”. 

As mysterious as the water came up, a few days later it was back out. 

How to ruin a beach

We have a nice place in Daytona beach.  It’s got a bedroom, living room, and a kitchen – plus it’s oceanfront with a nice balcony.  However, they allow driving on the beach!  I don’t know why…but it really ruins it for me. 

You can sit on the balcony, but you hear the loud music of cars driving by.  You can lay on the beach, but cars drive by just feet from you, and can park right next to as well.  We have even seen a backup of cars on the beach…it’s just wrong.

But, when this is the view and not grey skies and snow, I guess you can’t complain too much.

Space Shuttle Launch

We’re staying in Daytona Beach these days, so it was only about an hour drive to go see the launch of space shuttle Discovery.  I’ve always wanted to see a launch and now there are only 3 left, so it was perfect timing that we happen to be so close.  In fact, we purposely stayed in this general area so that we could go…of course staying in Florida in February wasn’t a hard thing to do :)

We had a great view! I think we were about 11 miles away, so it took a while for the sound to reach us, but we did hear it.

It moves very fast – a few minutes of excitement.  We were able to ever so faintly see the solid rocket boosters falling.  Look closely and you can see them in the picture below.

What a great experience…I’m so happy we were able to witness this.

Back to Orlando

We had some time to kill due to some lodging problems – namely, the upcoming shuttle launch and the Daytona 500.  One area we knew there would be plenty of hotels – Orlando.  So, we headed inland for a few days. We’ve been fortunate to often  have rooms with fridges and microwaves. However, there’s never really room for storage, so we often just leave our groceries in the bags on the floor.  Staying in hotel rooms for extended times is sort of like camping indoors.  We have our dishes, but no kitchen. Our place in Islamorada had a patio so we used our camp stove there, but in your typical hotel room like this one in Orlando we just eat cold meals: sandwiches, hummus, crackers, cereal. It really makes you appreciate hot meals when you have them.

We spent three days at the hotel, mostly working on Jason’s business, but taking a break in the afternoon to go to the pool.  The hotel was very empty during the day – everyone else is off at all the local attractions.  On our last day, we went to Universal Studios.  The crowds aren’t too bad yet.  We had to wait about 20 minutes for some of the popular rides, but towards the end of the day the lines were just about gone. 

We liked the new Simpsons ride – at least it was new to us. Last time we were here (2002?) this was a Back to the Future ride.  We really like the Revenge of the Mummy roller coaster – we rode it three times!  Two of them back to back without any lines.

We stayed until the park closed at 7pm – still plenty warm out though! Got to love Florida in the winter!