7.30am down to breki- although most students decided to sleep in an extra half hour rather than fight for a chair in the very cramped dining room.
9.00am onto the bus (all our chartered transport has been on luxury coaches) for the 45min drive to Kennedy Space Centre (KSC). Here we hopped onto one of the many tour buses that ply the same route- we travelled passed the giant assembly building (where the rockets are pieced together before launch) to a look-out tower, from here we could see the launch towers and the crawler track. We then drove on to a museum featuring a Saturn V rocket. Here we had a lunch stop before travelling onto a display featuring the International Space Station (we could look into a room were actual components were being assembled). Our final leg took us back to the KSC. Along the way the tour included a number of video presentations of the various features of the region. We also got to see numerous Alligators in the roadside ditches along with tortoises, egrets, a dead Armadillo and a huge Bald Eagle nest.
At KSC the highlight was a 3D Imax movie on the moon landings. There were a number of interesting displays enjoyed by the ‘strong’ but the ‘wimps’ were largely all museumed-out by this stage and spent an hour relaxing on the lawn.
5.00pm on the bus for the drive back to Orlando. A few of us enjoyed a swim in the hotel pool before we headed out to dinner-Chinese with Mrs Mengler or Sizzler with Mr Roberts.
James Hill was given a surprise tonight – his Mum and three brothers arrived a day earlier than expected and booked into our hotel.
The award for best ‘team effort’ today went to Matt, who despite emptying the contents of his stomach a couple of times, soldiered-on and managed to get through the day sleeping on benches whenever he could. He seems to have recovered a little this evening; hopefully he will be brighter tomorrow for the trip home.
By Team Leader 1.
