This morning we started the day by having Enterprise Car Rental pick us up at the dock and before too long we were riding around Melbourne in a lime green Chevy Spark. Bill had already found his breakfast restaurant and it was a decent pick. We tried to find another medical clinic to go to since my ear has not gotten better but we were unsuccessful. We decided we would go back to the first one now that the doctor would be there, but we would have to wait until tomorrow.

There were only two other items on our agenda. Ultimately our goal was to be on Playalinda Beach on the Canaveral National Seashore before the Atlas 5 rocket launched at 1:28pm on its way to Mars. Titusville is on the way there though and we had been told a number of times that that is where the manatees hang out. We have not been successful in seeing a manatee, but we have never stopped in Titusville either. We decided to stop at the marina there and see if we could find a manatee. Success! There are lots of manatees there. We had a good time walking from dock to dock and finding the huge creatures hanging out in the water and under the docks. We got some good pictures, which I will post soon. They are pretty funny looking!

The big event though was the rocket launch. We got to the beach about an hour and a half before the scheduled time. We had to park in the third parking lot because there were so many people who had come to watch. We found on the way out that there were many illegally parked cars too. Most of the people walked all the way down the beach until they got to the safety fence that you can’t go past. Some of the people had to stand in the surf to get a better view. Not us though. About one quarter of a mile before the blocked part of the beach Bill found a man sitting on a chair next to a spotting scope and asked him if he thought the view was as good there as it was up a bit closer. After some discussion it turned out it probably was. We found out it was the man’s 70th birthday and he was there with his son and his grandson, from North Carolina. We asked if they minded us setting up our camera next to them. It worked out great for us. The grandson was a delightful young man the same age as our grandson Sam. He was an expert on the space program and he wowed us with the details he knew, including the fact that we were the closest we could be to the launch site, even closer than the NASA guests. His dad had a radio that had the NASA Mission Control channel. Our cell phone didn’t even have coverage so we couldn’t tell if the rocket would even launch, but luckily we didn’t need it. We got minute by minute updates from the radio. The weather looked to me like it was deteriorating, and it wasn’t the best for picture taking, but at exactly 1:28pm the rocket launched and we were able to get the picture above.

We still had the car for the rest of the day but we didn’t have too much to do. We made a couple of stops in town and then finished the day by driving over the bridge to a little Cuban restaurant that was really excellent. We had a great waitress too – which of course Bill guilted into reading our blog.

Our plans are to do some work on the boat for the next week, but we aren’t sure where, or how much we will actually get done. We’ll have to see how it goes.