Orlando Tourist Alert!

The first time I went on a road trip to watch my beloved Washington Wizards play ball was 2007 when I went to Minnesota to watch the Wiz play the Timberwolves on a Sunday in February. That trip was supposed to be a one day affair, flying into Minneapolis just before tip off and getting out of town a few hours later. But mother nature had other ideas and sent heavy snows to the D.C. area which closed all the local airports and forced an unplanned overnight stay up north for me and my friend Mike.

The night we got stranded found us at a bar talking to our bartender about living in Minnesota. The next morning we explored Minneapolis on foot, walking down the Mississippi River, checking out the Mall of America and discovering the wonderful art deco Minneapolis Post Office. That walk around town got me thinking that maybe trips to see the Wizards would be better if they featured a little exploration of whatever city we were visiting and a night or two stay rather just getting into and out of town as soon as possible. Since that 2007 trip, I've made four other trips to see the Wizards on the road and I've stayed overnight on all four, with the most recent being last weekend when I took a four day trip to Orlando to watch the Wizards take on (and lose to) the home Magic.

The entrance to Kennedy Space Center, with the Atlas and Redstone rockets used in the Mercury program on the right.

Of all the places in the United States, Orlando has to be THE tourist mecca, doesn't it? I can't imagine the place existing anywhere close to the way it does without all the tourist attractions that have been built there. As such, we had no problem filling a couple of days being tourists like everyone else down there. While it was really really tough to pass up The Holy Land Experience, we decided to spend our two whole days in central Florida at Disney's Animal Kingdom and the Kennedy Space Center. And I'm serious about The Holy Land Experience. I think it would be fantastic to see what that's all about, although let's face it, there's no way I'm getting my money's worth there.

While I was excited to go back to Animal Kingdom, which I had visited shortly after it opened in 1999, I was really looking forward to a return trip to Kennedy Space Center (abbreviated as KSC, which just sounds too much like KFC). I was last there in 1980 with my family on what was probably our first real fancy vacation after we moved to the United States. According to my mom, it cost $800 for all four of us to travel to and stay in the Orlando area including passes to Disney World (at that time they didn't have any of the other parks) and transportation to Kennedy airport in New York. I was a lot younger then and have very little memory of that trip (other than sitting on the Dumbo ride for my sister's birthday fireworks on July 4 - random, I know) and none at all of going to Kennedy Space Center. At that time in my life my understanding of the space exploration program was that at some point men had landed on the moon but pretty much every kid is fascinated by space travel and astronauts, right? The one thing I know for sure happened last time I visited Kennedy Space Center is that I picked a very stylish t-shirt, shown below on me at Niagara Falls the following summer. Love the shorts, socks, hair and digital watch; they all complement my brown sneakers beautifully.

I'd like to think that I understand a lot more about the United States' space program now than I did in the early 1980s, although admittedly most of my knowledge is based on watching the movies The Right Stuff about 50 times (my favorite movie of all time) and Apollo 13 about five times. I thought it would be interesting to flesh out my knowledge of the Gemini and Apollo programs a little and try to get those on par with what The Right Stuff taught me about the Mercury program. As an aside, I only agreed to go with my dad to see The Right Stuff if he would take me to see The Osterman Weekend; he definitely picked the better of the two movies to go see.

Kennedy Space Center today features museum buildings, an outdoor rockets display, two IMAX theaters, a shuttle simulator ride and some sort of Angry Birds attraction (which we skipped). But the highlight for me was the bus tour of the entire facility. The tour takes you around the Vehicle Assembly Building (where they build the rockets), down the path that the mobile crawler uses to transport the rockets to the launch pads and over to an observation gantry where you can get a distant view of the launch pads and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, where the Mercury and Gemini launches took place. Kennedy was built specifically for the Apollo program because the launch pads at Cape Canaveral couldn't accommodate the Saturn V rockets that would be needed for lunar missions. We also saw a lot of alligators along the way hanging out in the water along the sides of the roads. I'm not sure I'd be thrilled about working at a place where they have wild animals that can eat a person just hanging out.

Halfway through the bus tour, there is a stop at the Apollo / Saturn V Center, which contains the control room used during the Apollo 8 launch, the mission that first orbited the moon, and a life size Saturn V rocket, all thirty plus stories in height on its side. The exhibits articulate pretty effectively the process of a lunar mission and the sheer size of the Saturn V rocket is impressive. It's just amazing to me that man could conceive of and execute sending someone to the moon and back, especially considering what crude (compared to today) equipment they had available to them in the 1960s. It's interesting to note that every section of the Saturn V rocket appeared to be manufactured by a different defense contractor. Our government at work, I guess.

If I had another opportunity to go back to Kennedy Space Center, I think I'd take the Vehicle Assembly Building tour. I think it would be amazing to see the space they assemble the rockets prior to launch. But the basic bus tour gave so much information, it was definitely the way to go for an almost first time visitor.

Of course no trip to Kennedy Space Center would be complete without some freeze dried ice cream. I can't remember how I got my hands on my first freeze dried ice cream all those years ago (it may have been at Kennedy) but there's something about it which is both awful and awesome at the same time. So before heading out of the park and back to Orlando I treated myself to a cookies and cream freeze dried ice cream sandwich. Delicious. Actually not all that delicious but it brought back memories so it was totally worth it.

And in memory of my trip here in the early 1980s and that awesome photo of me at Niagara Falls, I felt I needed to pick up a new Kennedy Space Center t-shirt and strike the pose in front of the Mercury program rockets. I'm a little bigger and have a little less hair on my head, but I'm thinking I look a little more stylish today, although I'm probably way off base here. It's probably just the Ray-Bans. Anyway, I'm glad I'm around thirty some years later to do this again.