Cape Canaveral, Florida : The Space Shuttle

While visiting Disney World in November and December of 2006, I heard that the space shuttle would be launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida. I know how to get there because I was there one other time, only this time it wouldn't be on accident. A few years ago, while visiting Orlando, my boyfriend and I tried to find the closet beach to Orlando. We ended up getting lost and going the wrong way down a dead end road. When we got to the end of the road we saw over 20 men dressed with black hats and dark uniforms. I've never seen anything like that before. It's a very high security place but it's quite interesting to have seen.

This year was quite different. When we arrived in Orlando we ran into many problems. We got rear ended on our way to Walgreens. I almost lost my cell phone at Disney World. My boyfriend thought he lost his keys in a horrible city in Florida at around 10:00 pm. We did run into many problems, but the highlight of the vacation was seeing the space shuttle launch out of Cape Canaveral. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity to see this happen, so we decided to drive closer and get a better look.

We were staying in Orlando which is about 1 hour from Cape Canaveral. We didn't leave as early as we should have due to our daughter who wasn't behaving the best. We drove as far as we could while I watched the minutes count down. A few minutes before it was going to launch we pulled over in a parking lot and got the video camera and camera ready. I've never seen anything like this before.

We knew the second the space shuttle launched. The whole sky lit up like the fourth of July. The whole sky was bright orange in the area the space shuttle was being launched from. It was moving very fast and it was completely out of view in about 4 minutes. It looked like a huge ball of fire. We were about 30 minutes away and the space shuttle was the size of a dime in the sky. I didn't think it was going to be that large. It was almost hard to take the picture because it was moving quite quickly.