T minus TOMORROW

Not 4am.  3am.  Do you remember Christmas Eve as a child?  Did you ever have a hard time falling asleep?  I never dreamed of sugarplums.  I couldn’t dream!  That was last night.  And when I heard the busses picking up the VIP groups from the Marriott Courtyard across the street from our church at 3am I gave up trying.

I woke Mona at 3:30.  Well, I would have, but she was already awake,  So we packed some snacks and headed up A1A to the Canaveral Causeway and its north side Banana River pull offs.

4am and the crowd was gathering. Campers, cars, trucks; police lights flashing all around the perimeter of the causeway, river, canal, Canaveral itself .

Only 3 hours to go but we had our spot! We were not going to miss the first space shot of the Orion Deep Space, sometimes called MARS MODULE, space craft. EFT-1. Experimental Flight Test Number One.

We watched live NASA TV on cell phones. We watched the sky gradually lighten over the Cape and strained our eyes to see the brightly lit up but miles away launchpad 37 where the earth’s largest space vehicle was blowing nitrogen dioxide into the air from its vents.

T minus 30 minutes and… holding!  Some darn tourist in a boat was too close to the base!  7:05, the beginning of the almost 3 hour launch window and there’s a loan boater holding up the show! “It happens”, says our neighbor who lives right at the end of the causeway in Port Canaveral.

7:30 comes and goes.  The boater is moved out but now ground winds are too strong.  I try to imagine what kind of winds NASA is afraid of for their millions of pounds of space ship and NASA TV says ’20 miles an hour’.  Hey, they’re the engineers.

8am.  No one has left so far as we know.  Some have even been added to the throngs lining every parking lot and pull off they can see from for miles around.  The VIPs who left our next door hotel at 3am are either in the lounge on the 7^th floor of the Exploration Center enjoying breakfast leavings, or up at the Visitor Center where the neighbor beside us knows her husband is giving out NASA info on request.

9am. The wind had died down but now a fuel valve is stuck. An old memory is jogged and I think I can hear Walter Cronkite speaking on our table model 15” diagonal 1960’s black and white TV, though he’s somewhere at an outside desk near where we are waiting, telling us, ‘We are being told a fuel valve is sticking and the hold is continuing on Mercury, Gemini, Apollo number….” Ah, the good old days are back.

9:45am and the launch window closes.  No launch today. The Brevard County Police know what to do.  They keep traffic moving slowly but surely and the crowds are sent home, or to school or work in good, commendable order.

We headed across the causeway to Cocoa on the mainland to get our new Shur-Flo fresh water pump ordered. The old one is pumping pretty well but it seems the impeller is broken inside from all the noise it is making.  $300.00 tomorrow afternoon, installed. Ka-ching for Coastline RV!

So repair it, why don’t cha!  Right.  There are few repairs on RV components like this pump.  It’s the nature of our replace, don't repair, economy.

Back to the coach and we fall, literally, into bed. We sleep till early afternoon.  Then, between light rain squalls, we take a walk to the nearby Indian River shoreline, and I leave Mona to read a while as I walk down the street to the flagship RON-JON SURF SHOP (super store, really).

Part museum it is the Cabella’s of American surfing.. Or Cabella’s is the Ron-Jon of American outdoorsing.  RJ was founded in 1961 in New Jersey.

And I’ll bet you thought Hawaii was the world center of the surfing crowd! 

The ORION launch is reset for 7am tomorrow morning and we are still at First UMC in Cocoa Beach, one block from the ocean.  We aren’t going quite so early tomorrow though.  We’re old hands at this now.  We’ll show up at 6.

-Ken