Cape Canaveral

We packed the car the night before so all we had to do the following morning was get ourselves out of bed and jump in the car. The next morning, we woke up at 5 am and by 6 am we were on the road for a three-hour drive north from Miami to Cape Canaveral.

Once we got there, we parked the car at a place called Port Canaveral (just south of Cape Canaveral) at about 9 am and started getting excited, because there was going to be a rocket launch with four humans on board to take them to the International Space Station. We needed to wait for about an hour until the launch was expected to take place, so we had some lunch and walked around the water’s edge. During this time we had the chance to see dozens of sea turtles. I have lived next to the ocean all of my life but I’ve never actually seen sea turtles, let alone this many. I got quit a few good pictures.

After our sea turtle excitement it was close to launch time. We walked to the edge of the jetty to get the best view while and were live streaming the commentary from the NASA website. There was five minutes to go and NASA was watching a storm cloud that was forming near the launch site. At this point, they said it was still a 60% likelihood of ‘go for launch’. It got down to 60 seconds till launch when  they cancelled it. They make these judgement calls because the astronaut’s safety is top priority, and they rescheduled this launch for the next day, which meant we might get to see it from the Kennedy Space Centre which was our plan for tomorrow.  

After the no-launch, we drove down to Cocoa Beach, it was around midday at this time but it was still a while till we were able to check-in to the place we were going to stay. We needed to kill some time, so we went to a surf shop, then the hunger struck so we decided to have our first iHop experience.

iHop is a famous American fast-food restaurant with Pancakes and all different types of American breakfasts. Let’s just say it didn’t live up to our expectations. The food was very sweet and didn’t taste amazing. Before we even left the car park my mum was throwing up. Whilst still recovering from the culinary trauma, it was time to go check into ‘Motel 6’ where we were going to stay for two nights.

This turned out to be the worst place we have been to on this trip. We walked in and basically instantly said no. There was cigarette smoke baked into the walls, a random water drip coming out of the roof that was streaming straight through the light switch, so if you tried to turn it on you could get electrocuted. The entire carpet was saturated with water so it would have been disgusting to stay there for two nights. They tried to give us another room; this room was also freshly cleaned but it was still wet this time you could see the clumps of dust and pet hair all over the wet floor on which we had to place our luggage. So, we left.

However, we still didn’t have accommodation for that night. All this was a lot of hassle, but it isn’t the first time our accommodation for the night had fallen through. It happened when we just arrived in Chile / Valparaiso, and this was actually how we ended up in Freddy’s place (JaguiHaus) which was such a fortunate event in hindsight. On this occasion we went to Starbucks (this has reliable internet and aircon) as a place to figure out where we would stay for the next two nights.

David our official travel planner had to call Airbnb to get a refund which they did immediately after viewing the photos of the actual place rather than the advertising photos. They also gave us a voucher to use on our next accommodation. After some more admin work David found a new place for us to stay which was located in Titusville.

Soon after arriving in our new little cabin, we stocked up on some groceries and based on our iHop experience we only bought healthy things. Dinner that night was fresh, nourishing, and delicious; exactly what we needed to reset. We tucked in early, excited for the next day’s adventure: the Kennedy Space Centre. But that’s a story for the next post.