Our next destination was 250 miles (400kms) north - Cape Canaveral. We went via central Miami (good test for me with the road rules on the right-hand side of the road; I'm a natural ;)

Further north we went through Palm Beach - rich-person territory with huge expensive houses right on the beach front.

With time getting on and still a lot of miles to cover, we moved away from the coast and headed inland to Interstate 95 (I-95) which runs parallel to US Route 1 but is faster with a speed limit of 70mph (110km/h). This Cruiser was a little more hardcore than ours hehe.

More overly-patriotic Americans.

All along the Interstate were bits of tyre tread and other crap that have come flying off trucks that nobody bothers to collect.

I'd said to Mo a few days earlier that me getting pulled over by the fuzz in America would be a good shot for the website hehe. Well, unintentionally, it happened. I was apparently clocked at 88mph which I find pretty hard to believe but I didn't bother arguing about it (and it occurred to me later I really should've asked to see the readout on his laser but never mind). He was actually really friendly and I was almost tempted to ask for photo with him, but I didn't.

I was stung US$180 for that (around £90). However, when I paid a little more attention to the ticket, I noticed he'd gotten my address wrong, my birthdate wrong (due to the wrong date format again), and even the road wrong (he's put state road 9 instead of I-95)! So am I going to pay it? Maybe ;)

After a while I suddenly noticed there was no traffic on the other side of the road - absolutely none. A couple minutes later we saw why. In the distance on a sweeping bend I could see the back of a car that had its front wedged right under the middle of a truck. When we passed it we could see it was the driver's side of the car that took the brunt, and I think it's pretty unlikely anyone could've survived that - it was a tangled mess. At this point there were no emergency vehicles left at the scene - just a bunch of tow trucks trying to clean up. Traffic was being diverted, and for the next four miles there was a huge line of it going nowhere. The I-95 is no stranger to accidents, and from what I saw I' not surprised (more on that later).

We spent the next two nights in Cocoa, just south of Cape Canaveral. On the first night we had dinner in the International House of Pancakes (IHOP), yummy!

Our reason for going to Cape Canaveral was this - NASA's Kennedy Space Center - the launch site and one of two landing sites for the Space Shuttle and landing site for the orbiter vehicle. We spent the bulk of the day here and saw some pretty amazing stuff!

Ooooo rockets!

This is looking towards the main launch pad. In the shot on the left, the white storage tank on the far-left holds 3.5 million litres of liquid oxygen at -183 degrees Celsius, and the tank on the far-right holds around the same amount of liquid hydrogen at -253 degrees. The liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen are pumped into the shuttle's external tank (the big rusty-coloured thing) which supplies them under pressure to the orbiter's three main engines during lift-off and ascent. When the main engines are shut down, the external tank is jettisoned and falls back to Earth, breaking up in the atmosphere, and impacts in a remote ocean area. It is not recovered.

The Orbiter Processing Facility (OPF). When a mission is completed, the orbiter is parked in its OPF. Its previous mission payloads are removed and the vehicle is extensively inspected, tested, and refurbished, including re-tiling of the Thermal Protection System. The payloads for its next mission are then installed and checked out. This entire process takes around 90 days, after which it's ready for another launch.

Looking over towards a number of other launch pads and other bits and pieces within Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

A former space shuttle orbiter on display for everyone to have a nosey at, along with an external tank and the two solid rocket boosters that also provide thrust during launching before being jettisoned.

This thing is amazing! I'm not sure how many times it was launched but it leads a comparatively boring life now.

The control terminals actually used during some of the Apollo missions.

The mighty Saturn V rocket! Look at the size of these bastards - they'd toast your marshmallow! The Saturn V was used between 1967 and 1973, during which NASA launched 13 of them. It consisted of three stages; the first stage used the five F-1 engines shown above to get the rocket through the first 61 kilometres of ascent. The centre engine is fixed in place, while the other four can be hydraulically turned to control the rocket.

The second stage used five J-2 engines to get the rocket through the upper atmosphere...

And the third stage used just a single J-2 to take it in into orbit.

The command module atop the Saturn V.

Then we saw some moon stuff: A lunar lander...

A lunar rover (this thing looks like fun!)...

And this is supposedly a piece of rock from the moon that you can touch, though it really could be anything (but I touched it anyway :)

This area contained parts in development that, when completed, will be sent up and become part of the International Space Station - a research facility orbiting the Earth that has been continuously inhabited since late 2000, thereby providing a permanent human presence in space. It is still being assembled piece by piece, and is expected to be completed in 2010. Pretty amazing stuff I thought! Check out this shot of the Space Station being worked on over New Zealand! :)

It was a scorcher of a day today, and even the birds were feeling it hehe.

Afterwards we went to Cocoa beach for a bit just to check it out. Nothing spectacular, but a nice way to kill an evening.