Cape Canaveral

Our next stop along the Florida east coast was a beautiful county park called Savannas Recreation Area and Campground.  After RV parks in urban areas up and down Florida, the quiet there was delightful.  By definition a savanna is a grassy plain, and the tall grass along the waterways in this park was home to many species of birds.  Birds in Florida tend to be more exotic than those in California.  Most of them have long necks and long legs, and their song is much more musical than what you hear from those damn crows back in the Santa Cruz skies.  There were signs along the canals reading "Don't feed the alligators", so we made sure our dogs were leashed at all times.

We then drove north and stayed for a few days in a place called The Great Outdoors RV, Nature, and Golf Resort.  This is an upscale 3000-acre development of a type we haven't visited before.  There are some conventional houses here, but mostly it's an RV resort in which the RV sites - each of which accommodates a motorhome or other recreational vehicle - are individually owned, and when the owners are away, they may rent out their sites to paying guests such as ourselves.

We spoke with a gentleman originally from Canada who had been living in the resort for many years.  He said it was a wonderful place, with friendly people and great weather, but the political opinions of the residents there was not to his liking.  He said that he had a sign on his front door saying that guests were requested to leave their politics outside.  That could be an issue for us as well.

We noticed that in addition to the concrete pads for the RV's, many residents had built permanent structures on the rear of their sites.  We learned that the square footage of those structures was restricted to one quarter that of the property, and that construction plans could not include a bedroom.  The intention, of course, was for everyone to sleep in the RV's, not in the houses.  Some of the sites were for sale for between $100,000 and $200,000, which did not include the RV, and seemed a bit high for the area considering that we saw brand new homes along the highway advertised as being "in the nineties".

Just down the road from our RV resort was Cape Canaveral, home to the Kennedy Space Center.  I'm a big fan of space exploration and Nancy isn't, so I went alone.  The Space Center includes a massive visitor complex, which is kind of an amusement park for the public.  It includes a "rocket garden" that displays examples of many of the rockets that NASA built for their space programs over the years.  The ones displayed are actual rockets which could have have been used but weren't.  (If they had been, they would have burned up in the atmosphere.)

America's space shuttle program re-used its shuttles, which were carried into space on the backs of rockets and then re-entered the atmosphere and landed conventionally at airports.  This is the actual Atlantis space shuttle, which flew 33 missions over 26 years.

Former astronaut and retired aeronautical engineer Joe Tanner spoke about EVA's - extravehicular activities - and showed videos of his spacewalks (he did seven of them).

NASA is currently in a down phase due to severe budgetary restrictions and a lack of enthusiasm in Washington, but SpaceX (the brainchild of Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla Motors) and Boeing have active space programs and use Cape Canaveral as their launch site.  The next scheduled launch is by SpaceX on April 2, and you can sign up to view it.  What an experience that would be!  SpaceX's mission is to send humans to Mars and begin colonizing that planet within ten years.  An exciting prospect!

I spent most of the day at the space center, and when I returned Nancy said that she hated for me to be gone so long, and that she gets bored when I'm not around.

You buy that, don't you?