Houston we have a problem!!!!
The next day was the half way point of our adventure, so dictated we were back at Port Canaveral for the swap over of new passengers and crew, it also meant that everyone on board had to get off the ship to go through the American immigration checks, this included all the crew members as well. Some of the life boat had been lowered, though I am not sure if that was for planned maintenance or do the immigration officers could do spot checks for stowaways or maybe a bit of both.
We had booked ourselves on a full day excursion to Cape Canaveral Space Center, which was the most expensive trip we had booked at over £100 each, so we had high expectations. I deliberately left out one thing in earlier blogs, thinking it would fit into this nicely. On our 1st day whilst we were leaving Port Canaveral we were lucky enough to witness a space launch, which was amazing and probably the highlite of the holiday so far. The lauch should have taken place the prevois day, but was postponed due thunder and lightening in the area, and if we hadn't been delayed on our arrival, we may have been too far out of port to have seen it, certainly in as much detail.
The coach trip to Cape Canaveral took 45 minutes, and the guide(Jeffrey) on the coach was brilliant, and spun us a great yarn about how he had worked at the space centre before he retired and had taken to guiding when his wife retired, just for something to do and earn a few extra bucks no doubt, and his wife had taken to work in one of the gift shops there for the same reason. On this trip a lot of the ground staff that Tui employ seen to be older than those in Europe , and they seemed so genuine in their welcome, and seemed proud that you had chosen to visit their country.
Jeffrey told us that although we were there for about 7 hours we wouldn't get around to seeing everything, but did give us recomend the best things to see 1st to maximise our time there and to be fair it was pretty good advise.
It was a theme park, and Jeffrey was right there would be lots of queues, the biggest one was to get in the place, which proba ly took the best part of an hour even having pre puchased tickets after the queues tended to be about 10 minutes. We ignored the rocket garden as Jeffrey had advised and headed right, once we got in to the coach with would take us to the lanch pad area. Here you got to see the launch area, be it from distance, then into a series of short movie theatre shows which were all about the early space exploration up to the 1966( less than a month before I was born) space landing, when Neil Armstrong became the 1st man to walk on the moon, and culminated in a large display hanger to showcase to story.Jeffrey had said that nearly all the displays were genuine, obviously not the ones that went into space as a lot of them never returned, but the one built but never used because they had been superceded by newer improved models.
Downstairs were displays about life in space ( not extra terrestrials) like how astronauts ate, exercised and went to the loo in zero gravity.Also in this area was the next longest queue, which I am so glad I queued up for and was a simulated space shuttle take off, again amazing!!!!.
From there is was to gift shop(yep you guessed it shot glass and postcard), though I did treat myself to a new baseball cap and NASA tee shirt. By this time we were getting hungry so opted to sit outside and enjoy the Florida sun whilst we ate, and made the most of the free NASA wi- fi and whatsapp called the kids back home. That just left us an hour or so to have a last mouch around, Jeffrey was right we hadn't had time to for it all but we can always go back.
Pongo and Perdita signing off
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