Return to Kennedy

I had company for breakfast this morning. These four appeared from nowhere and spent several minutes foraging in the grass behind our pool, completely unintimidated by my presence on the patio.

It's exceptionally quiet around here. I actually miss General (our neighbour from last year) giving his employees a hard time at 7am!  We've briefly seen two occupants of the property to our left. A man probably in his early thirties popped out to clean off the surface of his pool on Saturday (but hasn't appeared to use it at all) and a woman hung out a couple of towels on Sunday morning. Apart from them, I've not seen or heard anybody else in our little cluster of properties.

Today we had a plan - a return visit to Kennedy Space Center.  Unsurprisingly,  Harrison was the first person dressed and ready to go!

At 11:15am the main road outside our resort was virtually deserted (except for the digger on the opposite side of the road working to install a set of lights).  These traffic lights are definitely needed as it's sometimes very risky trying to cross the carriageways to start our journeys. We have on a couple of occasions turned right and gone up to the next set of lights (ironically those outside Legacy Park where we stayed last year) and used them to help us cross to the other carriageway.  Today though, we had no problem at all getting across.

The journey to Kennedy is about 60 miles and does start to get rather boring once we've turned onto the 528. Apart from numerous toll booths to keep us awake, the road seems to go on forever.

I was glad when I finally saw this view:

As we pulled into the car park it struck us how few cars there were.  On our previous two visits there was supposed to be a launch, so maybe that's the reason the park had been so busy on those days.  It was a pleasant surprise to have easy access to all the attractions and to be able to take photographs without lots of 'extras' in the shots.

Back on familiar territory 😁

Our first visit of the day however, wasn't to one of the attractions but to the first aid room! Harrison got sun cream in his eyes and he was in a lot of pain with streaming eyes and nose! We'd tried our best to bathe his eyes using bottled water and tissues but still he could barely open them.

First aid room

The nurse washed Harrison's eyes twice with saline and he soon started to feel much better. He was given the rest of the saline bottle and a set of shuttle bookmarks. 

The first aid room was situated right next to the bus station so we decided to go on the tour to the Saturn V building again. I was really glad we did because we saw more of the launch pads close up than we did last year.

We noticed that there had been a few changes including the new SpaceX assembly building:

We entered the Saturn V building via the shop instead of watching the film for a third time! Once again, Harrison managed to part with all of his holiday money in the two gift shops.  Amazingly he found things that he didn't already have!

In the main shop a veteran astronaut was signing autographs:

We took a last walk around the rocket garden before we left.  Thank you Kennedy for another great day. All of the staff we encountered were extremely kind to Harrison. He ended up with a few freebies - the set of bookmarks from the Center's nurse; four packets of astronaut ice cream from two different shop staff and a NASA embossed pressed penny from one of the bus dispatchers!

On the way home we saw a fantastic hammerhead thunder cloud: 

and Mickey Mouse!