Habs on the Road

We drove down to Cocoa Beach for a few days to see the launch of an Atlas 5 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center that will re-supply the International Space Station on Tuesday.  We can’t wait!  We are going to watch it from the beach right outside of our hotel. 

Here is the flyer in the hotel that shows with the rocket looks like

Here’s a photo taken today. It stands 191 feet tall!  You can see the people down below if you look closely.

The rocket is going to launch from the red dot on this map and we are located where the blue dot is:

Tripp is already scoping out the perfect spot:

We ate dinner at an awesome barbecue place called Graham’s Smokehouse in Cocoa Beach. The brisket was on believable!



We took a walk along the beach this evening and we saw a few of these crabs that run super fast!  I chased one down with my camera, which made everyone else not happy that I had taken the only flashlight away from them.  😁 They thought they would be attacked by crabs!

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In the photo below, you can see a vertical white light they shine in the air that shows where the rocket is going to lunch.  So cool!!

Tomorrow, I will upload a video of the rocket launch. We can’t wait!!!!!

[Side note – the DMV got the title to our RV today so we can finally register our vehicles, get our driver’s licenses, and become official Florida residents this week!]

We are at the top of exploration tower, which is a look out point for a rocket launches (read the bottom of this blog post to find out why we didn’t watch it from the beach)

In the photo below, you can see the NASA Assembly Building in the distance

Here’s a video of the rocket taking off. It’s kind of shaky because I was wanting to just watch the rocket and not be staring through my phone. I was also shooting a couple of pictures with my Nikon. What’s funny is you will hear me telling Tripp to stop putting his hands over my eyes, since he was on my shoulders. It was pretty funny at also frustrating!

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So, overall it was really fun to see the rocket launch. We could hear the rumble in a little while after it took off. I had hoped it would look a little bigger and be a little louder from where we were, but still fun! On our way back to St. Augustine, we noticed that we could have had possibly a better view of the launch in Titusville, right on Hwy 1. The NASA assembly building is much much closer at that point then it was where we were located at Exploration Tower.  In Titusville, there would have been no obstructions and it would’ve been free. Now we know!

Oh yeah, so we originally had stayed at the Hilton Hotel in cocoa Beach, thinking we would just watch the rocket launch from the beach. But we couldn’t ignore the fact that there is a really nice view point at a place called Jetty Park just north of Cocoa Beach.  We would be a few miles closer that way. It turns out that everyone else had the same idea and there was a long line of cars to get into the park.  We were listening to NASA live and they said the launch was only 5 minutes away, even though it was scheduled for about 30 minutes later.  We panicked and headed toward Exploration Tower, which was close by, hoping they had a few tickets left to allow us to watch the launch from the seventh floor. It was only T minus 3 minutes when I went into ask about tickets!  Fortunately, they had tickets so we took the elevator upstairs as quickly as possible, only to find out that the launch was scheduled for the original time!