Kissimmee

I need to correct a mistake that I made in my blog last week. I know it is hard to believe that I could make a mistake. As the saying goes, “I have made only one mistake in my life, that is when I thought I was mistaken, and wasn’t.” I told you that we were going to see a cousin in Brooksville, FL that I hadn’t seen in more than thirty years. Will I was wrong, it had been more than fifty years. So we had a nice “catch up” visit, but no advance in the genealogical knowledge I was hoping for.

We got to Kissimmee alright and settled into a fairly nice campground off the beaten tourist path, some twenty miles from the Disney attractions. We were there for five days and not another camper came into the park. It is mostly settled by permanent or full-time residents, but nice enough except for a few problems getting a strong signal on the WiFi service.

We were able to catch up with our daughter Debbie and meet her boyfriend, Mike Murphy, and family on their vacation trip from California to Florida. We were able to join them in several excursions in the area. One of the most enjoyable trips was to the Kennedy Space Center. It is an amazingly large place with lots of informational exhibits. It took us the whole day to get through it. I have included some pictures from this visit, a picture of one of the two launch pads, the fuel tanks on which the shuttle sets and the shuttle “crawler”.

The crawler is an amazing piece of equipment. This is what transports the shuttle to the launch pad. It is huge! I haven’t seen any info that tells how truly large it is, but you can tell from the picture that it is bigger than a house. The statistics we were given are amazing. It moves on eight tractor feet. Each tract has 57 cleats and each cleat weighs 2,000 pounds. You can do the math. That is one big “dude”! The crawler moves the shuttle from the hangar to the launch pad, a distance of three miles. This three mile journey takes eight hours and requires a lot of fuel. We were told that the crawler gets 35 feet per gallon. That is 150 gallons per mile. The trip starts at midnight. I don’t know if this is to keep it from view or they just have to start early to arrive on time.

We also went Airboat riding in the marshes, the purpose of which is to see gators and other wild life. Of course we didn’t see a thing except a few cattle in the water. It turned out to be another “Murphy/Parsons law” effect. But what would you expect with seven Murphys and three Parsons on board. We watched a group of the family do simulated sky-diving in a wind tower. We spent one, long, hot, tiring, enjoyable day at Epcot Center playing the tourist. So in the almost two weeks we spent in the Sunshine State we covered a lot of central Florida and went from coast to coast.

We left Florida early on Thursday morning for the 330 plus mile trip to Cordele, GA. We are now at the Georgia Veterans Memorial State Park. We will continue our trip from here on Sunday, August 26, going north and then west. We will be making short one, two and three day stops on our way to Colorado by early September. We’ll talk to you again farther up the road.