When our Arctic cruise arrived in New Jersey, we quickly caught a flight to Orlando where Jen's parents had rented a timeshare for two weeks, and they had an extra room for us. Our only plan was to relax, shop, and enjoy the sun.
We decided to drive to Cape Canaveral for a day, to explore the Kennedy Space Center. We had read some positive reviews about it, but we had no real idea what to expect. We were pleasantly surprised with the place and the fact that they so many real spaceships for us to contemplate.
We started our visit with a quick history tour of U.S. space missions in the Rocket Garden. We were impressed by how small the astronaut capsules were, and couldn't believe that these tiny modules had actually been strapped onto real missiles.
Next we took a bus to see the Saturn V rocket, the 3-stage rocket that was designed to send astronauts to the moon. OMG, it is huge! In this section of the park, we learned about all of the early Apollo missions and the moon landings.
From there, we visited the Shuttle Pavilion, where we saw the actual Atlantis Shuttle. Once again, it was a lot bigger than we were expecting. We took a tour and learned interesting facts about the shuttle programs. The most notable was that the thermal protection blankets covering the shuttle’s belly, were actually hand-sewn by a team of highly skilled women.
Lastly, we explored a few more exhibits and tried some of the rides, but they paled in comparison to the first pavilions we visited.
It was a long day since we arrived right at opening (9 AM) and stayed all the way until closing (5 PM), but we had a fantastic time and learned a lot.