Day 51 – Kennedy Space Center

Lately I have been having a hard time writing these blogs.  It seems like I write the same things day after day and I am sure that anyone reading this has to be bored to death.  My days are not that much different from the preceding day unless some bad weather or something is taking place and I am glad to have none of that to report.

We did get up and get ready a little early today.  We had about 55 miles to ride, but there was a few of us that wanted to travel an extra 14 miles round trip to get to the Kennedy Space Center and take a tour.  The last tour started at 2:45, so we needed the early start to get there on time.  It was another beautiful day to ride.  We again rode by some great housing areas and some inland rivers.  We didn’t ride next to the ocean today, but these rivers are connected to the ocean where the tide has some effect on the rivers height.  I did get another flat today.  It was my seventh I think.  I still am leading the group. 

The flat made me a little later than I wanted to be, but we did get to the Center at 2:00.  It was a great tour.  It was a little sad due to the fact that it was centered on the space shuttle program and the space shuttle program is no more.  We did get to actually go into the space shuttle Explorer and see the cockpit and cargo bay and their living quarters.  The best part of the tour for me was a building that they have dedicated to the Apollo missions and they have a Saturn V rocket in there hanging on its side and it was absolutely huge.  It was as long as a football field.  It is just unbelievable that it takes a rocket that big to get a little capsule into space.  They had some movies about the Apollo 8 mission, which was the first mission to circle around the moon and the Apollo 11 (I think) mission, which was the first landing.  They have the actual terminals in the Center that were used and it just made you proud of our Country and the ingenuity of man to get something like that done.

There was one thing that I wanted to mention yesterday.  They are having this big motorcycle rally here (in Daytona Beach) in the next few days called Biketoberfest.  It is much like the rally in Sturgis and this area is becoming inundated with cycles.  The campgrounds that we stay at are full of them and there are bike shops and chop shops all over the place.  I guess it is one of the big gatherings in the US.

The building in which they built the Saturn V and the put the shuttle together with the rockets.  In the Apollo days, this was the largest building by volumn in the world.  Now it is the 4th largest.

 Saturn V Rocket used to propel the Apollo missions.

 The two well dressed people are Kennedy Center employees.  They were bikers and interested in what we were doing.  They gave us stickers that read, "I need my space".