Dad's Taxi's 2016 Trip, Part 5
Friday morning we spend by the pool, once again the weather is amazing. I nip out to get some pizza for lunch, then we point the car East and drive to Titusville. At 1643 EDT there is a launch scheduled from Canaveral Air Force Station, it’s a SpaceX Falcon 9 cargo flight taking supplies to the International Space Station.
We have a couple of destinations in mind. On our last trip we went to watch a similar launch (as reported here:
http://www.orlando-guide.info/forums...2%80%93-Part-9 ),
which was aborted at T minus 25 minutes. We had found a great vantage point called Nicol Park on the US1 Highway, so that’s a possibility today. We also know a McDonalds that looks straight over at the Space Centre, which we discovered shortly after watching a shuttle launch in 2010, and consensus today is that it might be worth cooling down with a McFlurry whilst we wait, so we look it up on Google maps, get the address and pop it in Mary-Beth the SatNav. It was a very easy trip over to the coast, and once we were enjoying our ice creams we wandered around to find the best view over the water. To our amazement, alongside the McDonalds is a little park, Rotary River Front Park, with a fantastic view, and even has a pier on which quite a few people had already chosen their spots for watching the launch. This screen grab will show it better than I can describe:
And so we joined them
We find a bench seat about halfway along the main pier, and make camp. We only have about 40 minutes to wait, which the girls pass by trying to poke a dead fish out from under the bench, and return it to the water! The fish (the ones that are alive) are an energetic bunch and keep us entertained by jumping up out of the water.
I find a countdown clock on a website, and when it reaches zero we are perplexed, where’s the rocket? We hear a shout - “there it goes” and everyone on the pier simultaneously realises we’ve all been looking the wrong way! There is a mass shuffling of people and we see the rocket a few seconds into its flight.
After it has disappeared from view we go back into McDonalds to cool down, it’s a scorcher and we’ve become very hot on the pier. A large cold drink sorts us out, then we set off for our next mission - to buy a Prom Dress at the Florida Mall.
Read on below……………
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