Space Shuttle Atlantis

Our final day in Orlando I didn't have anything scheduled.  I usually like to leave the last day open to do whatever we liked best or something we've heard about while we're there.  So we all decided to sleep in.  Around 9:00am I asked Terrence what he wanted to do and he mentioned it would be cool to see the Kennedy Space Center.  I started surfing the web to see what time they opened and get an address and said, "Hmmmmm, too bad we're not staying awhile.  It says the final space shuttle is launching on the 8th. Today's the 8th!!!  It says it launches in a couple of hours."  We had the kids out of bed in the car by, no joke, 9:15.  We thought there would be no way of actually getting there since there was a predicted one million people that would be attending, but we couldn't be that close and not try.  The roads were packed but we made it within 3 miles with 15 minutes to spare!  They just shut the freeway down and everyone parked in the middle of it.  There were people there from all over the world to watch that had come just for this event.  We felt pretty lucky to be there by the skin of our teeth.  It looked like one of those alien invasion movies where everyone is waiting for the world to end or something.  It was sooooo cool to be there for this historic event.

Up...

Up...

and away!

The entire visual lasted around 10 seconds before the shuttle went into the cloud cover.  The crowd was so quiet you could hear a pin drop.  Then when it went into the clouds there were laughs and cheers.

We didn't even hear the blastoff sound until we were walking back to our cars.  You could see the plume for miles and for quite some time.

Then we headed to Cocoa Beach for a burger on the pier.  It took about 2 hours to go 30 miles.

Everyone was much happier after we fed them.

We figured the crowd had cleared out and it would be safe to head to the Kennedy Space Center to see if there were any activities going on.  I thought the astronaut was hot so we had our picture taken with him.