Merry Christmas from 78 degrees!

We said we’d sleep in, and we did.  Oh, it felt good to take full showers again!

There was a small flea market happening in the parking lot of our next door neighbor, the Presbyterians. 

Mona found two books and I found our 2014 Christmas Tree… each for a quarter.

 

Next, we met some unpaid servants trimming shrubs in the church prayer garden next to the UMC sanctuary on our other side.  They have a wall of brass plaques dedicated to the persons whose cremains are scattered in this ground.  Jim and Judy take care of this service, and work with the Food Pantry here at First UMC of Cocoa Beach.  We’ll try to help them out tomorrow afternoon when they next serve.

Then we drove over the rte  528 causeway to Merritt Island Post Office but the mail had not arrived yet (‘Sir, it is Christmas Season. Maybe Monday’).  Then we drove back to Cocoa Beach for their annual Christmas Parade.

As advertised, it ran from 2 pm through 3 pm. And it was also as our friend at the library had said, quaint, small townish, and fun. I picked up a bunch of thrown candy and helped a little fellow beside us get a whole lot more.

The high school band RODE.
They are called the 'Marching Minutemen',
named for the 1960's Minuteman Missile Defense system
set up to thwart Soviet missiles in Cuba

Larry Crum really needs to be a Shriner.
 look at the cute cars they get to drive!
They are midget racers at the
Golden Colorado Buffalo Bill Days Parade.

Back to the coach and a sunny afternoon of reading for Mona and the next third of the DVD MAGNIFICENT SEVEN for me.

A quiet evening is planned for we have to rise early tomorrow. Sunday School is at 8:45 here!

-Ken

BLASTOFF!!!

Not at 3am this morning.  No, we’re experienced space shot watchers now.  We KNOW the Cape routines. We HAVE the answer to where and when to get to see ORION blastoff. We woke up at 5:30, and arrived at 6:30 on the causeway for the successful launch of ORION at 7:05am. 

Plenty of time to park, relax, and view it all, including the donut-charged up Tiger Cub Pack at rivers edge who were driving their parental units batty by the time ORION flew.

The crowd had gathered as before. The cruise ship upper decks were crowded, and the newscaster from the local radio station was reporting all viewing spots surrounding the Cape once more packed to capacity.

This, the heaviest space craft to ever rise from the Earth was getting major press.

And then...

There was no sound as we saw the ignition light off the three upside down candles of Orion’s three engine first stage. Slowly. Agonizingly slowly she rose from her pad, gathering speed as the miles of distance between us and it were consumed with the growing roar of its millions of pounds of fiery thrust.

And just as we all, especially those sugared up Tiger Scouts, began to cheer to beat all she roared up through the clouds and only the faintest hint of grey smoke against her white gantry building reminded us she had been there at all. 

The roar continued a long while after she was gone as she invisibly hit the sound barrier, and beyond.

And within four hours ORION had splashed down in the Pacific as cleanly as if she’d been doing it for years.  And moments later the headlines read:

There's your new spacecraft, America

Splashdown! Orion Spaceship Aces First Test on Road to Mars

'Nearly flawless': Orion passes 2-orbit test flight

And we came home. Me to the classic MAGNIFICENT SEVEN on DVD, and Mona to three hours of catch-up sleep. But I only watched 30 minutes of the movie and went for a walk on the beach. 

There are nice community parks every quarter mile or so along A1A in Cocoa Beach that have beach access parking and facilities for swimmers. Fisher Park, just south of our church, was easy to walk to and I was able to catch a pic of the Christmas dec/TIKI god out front, and a 1976 US bicentennial monument to the first seven Mercury astronauts.

  

The morning was grey but the clouds kept their moisture, mostly, as I looked for interesting stuff to photo on the beach.  Like these Pipers, and this man-o-war jellyfish.  No. I did not go in today.

When I returned Mona and I shared lunch and walked the couple blocks up past the Ron-Jon store to the DINOSAUR STORE.  This business has been here for 19 years but in an older building across the street till just a couple years ago. 

Loaded with castings and authentic fossils this is called the largest paleologic retail store in the world. The top two floors are becoming a museum that opens this summer.

Intererestingly, Florida has no dinosaur fossils.  Only ice age and after mammals.  When the great lizards ruled the planet the Sunshine State was under water.

Then we hit the library.

At about 3pm the phone rang and it was Coastal RV telling us our new fresh water pump was in so we packed her up and by 4:05 FROG was getting her new hardware. And we would be taking full showers again!

So what do traveling explorers do the day after they’ve seen the biggest space ship ever go into orbit and the world’s biggest dinosaur retailer? They wake up late on Saturday morning and go watch the Cocoa Beach Annual Christmas Parade which starts about a half mile south of their camp site right on A1A. 

Hey, the librarian told us it’s a cute small town parade!  And the library has a float.

-Ken

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