Return to Florida

My first transatlantic trip ever was to Florida, a long time ago but I remember it well as I almost drowned 2 days in a row (the first being entire self inflicted due to me thinking it would be 'fun' to be tossed about in the waves of an approaching hurricane). So it was somewhat fitting that to celebrate me (somewhat miraculously) reaching the ripe old age of 40 I should return to the sunshine state for this reason and to share in another landmark 40th.

Yes indeed, 1969 was a great year for both hippies and geeks but it seems the I've more in common with the latter, unless you count my teenage Pink Floyd phase, although this was pretty much de rigueur for the time.

So back to Florida, though not to Disney although pretty much every adult who we talked to asked Dan and Becky 'hey, are you going to Disney?' to which they had to reply 'no' and so condemn us as mean parents, but I can live with that if it means I escape the most plastic place of the most plastic state - and anyway we had other fun things to see, which were much, much more exciting for the kids such as:

The actual command center for the Apollo 11 mission

And every child's favourite, the swing arm from the Apollo 11 flightBecky was really taken by the NASA Vehicle Assembly Building (this is pretty cool, it looks like a pretty big building but is actually a huge building (the 4th largest in the world by volume and the biggest single storey building in the world (each of the stripes on the American flag is 9ft wide).
One of my favourite things was the Saturn 5 rocket (like the one used for Apollo 11) which was housed in a special hangar - the thing is just massive, 36 storey's tall and too long to really get in a decent photo but you get some idea of seeing Dan next to it.And the launch site, though you can't get too close to that
Of course it wasn't all just educational fun for the kids, there were rides too, such as 'Nose Cone of Terror' which you can see the family enjoying here.
And it wasn't just rides, there was a park too, the Nasa Rocket Park
As well as There was Neil Armstrong look alike

In the late afternoon after visiting the space center we headed to the beach.
We also made it to Sea World, twice winner of the prestigious 'not so tacky as other theme parks' award which was so good we went there twice (which had very little to do with the second day being free - probably).





Probably the highlight was the killer shale show (or the Shamu show, Shamu being the name of the biggest killer whale they currently have in stock, job description - be very big and good at splashing people) This shot was a Shamu special, a little out of focus but a second after this was taken Becky and Andy (taking the photo) got soaked to the skin by this one, so much so that for our lunch booking at the shark viewing restaurant Andy had to buy new trousers.

Here is the shark view restaurant which was pretty neat as the fish could watch the humans being fed.

And this is pretty amazing, to see a couple of killer whales bursting out of the water in perfect synchronization with people standing on their noses is quite something.