Florida- Day 4

Saturday was our trip to Kennedy Space Center. We spent a half day there and then headed to the beach. Alysha promised me that we would see some big gators on the side of the road as we drove to the space center. What a liar. We didn't see a single one :o( Super sad day. We did the space center kind of quickly, but hit up everything, well, except for the two imax shows that they had playing. We kept on missing the show times and eventually decided not to hang around to check them out.

Let's see, what did we do there? ... We climbed into a bunch of landing pods that they had lying around outside, we looked at a bunch of real shuttles and rockets, took lots of pictures of us screwing around, road a space simulation ride (we had just done that the day before too at Epcot :o), saw the launch area- but there was not launch happening soon because we missed that by five days or something, took a tour of the whole center- storage areas and building centers and stuff. Yeah, I think that covers all of it. Oh, except for the fact that Alysha got called out by one of the guards when we went to go see the ..... shoot, I don't remember what it's called, but it's where they work on the parts that they're going to send up to the international space station. We were walking across a bridge that connects a room with fake parts in it to a room with the real stuff in it. Alysha was acting up- by acting up I mean she was trying to beat me up. It's not that hard for me to defend myself, but she always comes back for more and then is really confused when she ends up getting hurt. Don't think I'm a bully, I only act in self defense and I never use my full force. Anyway, she was trying to attack me so I blocked her, and when she came back to retaliate the guard caught her and gave her a "knock it off, you're too old for that" look. It was so funny, I couldn't help but laugh out loud. She, on the other hand, was really embarrassed. Hahaha. Good times :o)

After the space center, it was beach time. Oh, but before we went to the beach, we had to find our car in the huge parking lot. We started walking toward the general area of where I was sure we'd left the car, but then I was sure that we weren't that far back. I started to doubt myself about where we parked, when these two boys walked past us and said, "yeah, we lost our car too." No more than two seconds after we passed them I saw the car, looked back and said, "nope, we've found ours, good luck with yours though." Um, I'm sure it was something funnier than that, but it's now been like three weeks since it happened, so I can't remember exactly.

Because we had gone to the beach on Thursday and it was completely empty, I was expecting that again that day. No such luck. On Thursday we had gone to a random part of the shore, but Saturday we went to Cocoa Beach, a very crowded, very popular beach. Weird. You're allowed to drink on the beaches in Florida. That's not allowed on California beaches, so it was weird to see almost EVERYONE there with some type of alcohol in their hand. No one seemed absolutely wasted, so I wasn't worried about having to witness a drowning or anything like that. And again, the water way off is really pretty, but the stuff we swim in is brown and nasty. But it was still warm!

The waves were pretty strong that day (I just thought it was an East Coast thing, but I was informed later that it's not) and so Alysha had a hard time getting past the big waves. A couple times I helped her out (practically dragging her), but then the waves would take her right back in. So we decided to play in separate areas. I didn't like playing in the shallow water because that's where the waves just crashed into you and knocked you over. I much preferred going out deeper and playing in the waves and trying to body surf (I was not all that successful- but then again, neither were the boys with boogie boards so I don't feel bad). I didn't find out until later that Alysha is pretty much terrified of the water and isn't that great of a swimmer. When I found that out, I felt like the biggest booger ever. No wonder she didn't like being out where she couldn't touch.

We stayed at the beach for a couple hours, until the sun started going down and Alysha started falling asleep on the beach. Alysha had told Anne that we probably wouldn't be at the beach very long because she didn't think I would stay forever (in reference to how I can't stay forever at the pool at our apartment). Oh how wrong she was. I could have stayed much longer, but I could tell she didn't want to be there, so we left. It was a good day, but I was so surprised that I hardly got any tanage from being out in the sun all day long.