Oh dear! I think Harrison's comment about the Space Center being the best day of his life ever may have upset Lewis for tomorrow's race ;-) We woke up to hear that he's 9th on the grid for tomorrow's race. Harrison was up bright and early again because today is a return trip to the Space Center. I wonder whether he'll be up so early when we go to the factory outlets.....?!
Fortunately we bought multi-day tickets to the Space Center which gives us unlimited entry for a year. The launch has been rescheduled for 17:45 and there's still a lot of the park that we haven't seen so fingers crossed for this evening.
It's about one and half hours drive to Kennedy from our home. It's only about 60 miles but there are so many sets of traffic lights and toll booths that make the journey so slow. We had to refuel the car this morning because a full tank only holds around 300 miles. Bernard and I couldn't believe it when the cashier asked for $35! Think she was more surprised than we'd been when Bernard told her that we pay approximately $120 for a tank of fuel in the UK!
Good news and bad news when we got into the park this morning. Good because we got 3 complimentary car park passes with our tickets yesterday (parking is usually $10 per car) and we don't need to pay another $60 to view the launch from the Saturn V building later. Bad news because the tours to the VAB and mission control are both fully booked for today. Apparently only 45 seats for each were released.
The park had been invaded by 200 individuals wearing lime green t-shirts! I have to say that they really stood out amongst everybody else. 22q at the Zoo should have chosen a bright colour like this (instead of red) - it would certainly have got them noticed. The other thing that this group did which added to the impact (and caused congestion at times!) was to all stay together. I don't think that they were trying to raise awareness for a cause (they were from a French speaking church) but had they wanted to, they certainly attracted attention.
Our first mission for today was the Atlantis building. We watched two short films about it in two different rooms. As the final part of the second film faded, the screen lifted up to reveal Atlantis right in front of us! For me that was an even more amazing sight than seeing Saturn V yesterday. One thing that struck me was how visible each individual heat resistant tile was on the vehicle. I knew it had them but had never given a thought to the 'finished look' before. I had just assumed that it had a nice smooth paint job for aesthetic purposes!
The weather had started off much better than yesterday's and everything was looking good for the rocket launch. However, as we boarded our bus to take us over to the viewing area, we noticed that the weather over there was extremely dark. With two hours to go until the scheduled take off, things were starting to look doubtful again. Knowing how quickly the bad weather passed yesterday, we weren't too concerned at this stage. As we made our way towards the Saturn V building, we noticed that the videos being shown on the bus differed to the one's we'd already seen and the driver was taking a different route. He'd already mentioned that it would take us 40 minutes to get there which seemed rather slow considering that the journey only took about 15 minutes yesterday. We were taken on a tour past the VAB, one of the crawler trucks, a launch pad and the viewing gallery used when the shuttle was waiting on its pad. An added bonus was seeing two fire trucks with flashing lights hurrying to the viewing tower! We wondered whether there had been a lightening strike as there was a lot of prolonged electrical activity in the sky.
The weather seemed to be causing a few problems today. We weren't allowed to leave the building due to the amount of lightning. The rocket was set for launch but the weather needed to clear up before it could go ahead. We waited along with the majority, in the cafe - we couldn't even sit outside to drink our coffees. With 30 minutes to go we were able to leave the building but it was still not safe to sit in the viewing area. We could see the rocket through a gap in the trees and whilst waiting for further information we started chatting to an American couple. As we chatted we began to get wetter and wetter. Harrison and I were prepared with hoodies today because we'd taken notice when our bus driver told us yesterday that it rained there every afternoon at the same time! Today though, the rain just didn't want to move on. It hung around and along with 3 other weather violations, people became despondent and started to catch buses back to the main visitor centre. We held out until we heard from the officials that it had definitely been called off again. It was disappointing because the fault with the rocket had been fixed and as is often the case in the UK, it was the weather that had let us down. At least we hadn't arranged our trip specifically around the launch - it would have been an incredible unexpected experience. Bernard and I did come away with some free, unwanted mementos - I'm now the not so proud owner of 20 mosquito bites on my legs!
Our journey home was much faster this evening but rather disconcerting as we were heading straight for the relentless lightning flashes.
We stopped off at Walmart to pick up some groceries and I spotted these 'colourful' cakes:
The storm went on until 22:30 - Harrison was very relieved when it was over. He put the television on to divert his attention and came across this programme: www.bbcamerica.com/almost-royal/show/
I was very sceptical and thought we'd quickly be changing channel but it was actually really funny.
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