Christmas in Orlando
Holly and I decided to take a couple of weeks off in and around Orlando Florida. I wanted to put in a few helicopter flying hours at the Bristow Academy to keep my license active and then take Logan up for a flight. He hadn’t been flying in a helicopter with me as yet. I also wanted to visit the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral which I had missed on previous trips to Titusville.
I did three hours of flying with Jens, the former Chief Pilot, on the 300CBi after which he signed me off for my bi-annual review even though it had only been a year since I flew last. Jens spent the summer before flying an AS350 in Alaska and had some amazing images that he promised to send me. (Which he still hasn’t.)
That night I went over to Orlando to pick up Logan and the next day we did the tour of the launch sites and the space center with the highlight being the Apollo/Saturn V Center. The pictures don’t do justice to the feeling of seeing these monsters up close. The strange part was that the tour guides and tourists were obsessed with sighting alligators. The moon reaching rockets were almost secondary. I guess that shows the power of 165,000,000 years of evolution compared to the miniscule 50 year history of space travel. The fear of ancient reptiles is bred into us while the fear of burning up in the atmosphere is rather a new concept we have yet to grasp.
We spent Christmas day at the Epcot Center in Disney World. It was cold a dreary but we managed to have a great day out together. It didn’t really feel like Christmas but then again what does. At least Disney had a Christmas tree, old St. Nick and a rosy cheeked blond elf from Norway. (See the pictures.)
On Boxing Day I took Logan up flying with the doors off. We chased a few alligators along the St. John’s River and landed the 300CBi in a cow pasture along the Beach Line Rd before heading back toward the coast where we could see the Space Coast Airport and the Kennedy Space Center prep site from a distance. I had hoped to fly a circuit around the Daytona Racetrack but it was too damn cold to make it that far with the doors off. It was 16 degrees Celsius but with the wind chill that amounted to near hypothermia. My fingers were turning blue when we landed back at Space Coast.
The last day of our little holiday we spent at Universal Studios with lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe and a beer at Jimmy Buffet’s bar underneath the Grumman Mallard. We all flew back together on Air Canada to Winnipeg. It was freezing cold so I volunteered to take the shuttle to the car park and retrieve Holly’s Honda Civic Logan had left there only five days before. As per expectations of a normal post teenager (actually 20) he left the lights on. I thought modern cars had circuitry that dealt with that little human foible but apparently not. The battery was dead and but CAA had no compassion for my plight. They said it would take 3 hours for a boost. Honda managed to send a tow truck in only 2 hours.
Mo matter because the driver couldn’t jump start the battery so we had to have it towed to the Honda dealer. Of course it was a Saturday so we couldn’t retrieve the car until Monday. I booked a night in the Four Points Sheraton and rented a car for the next day to drive home. Naturally the fu*#*@ rental wasn’t plugged in and it was -32 Celsius the next morning and it wouldn’t start. I had to ask for another vehicle. It was just as frozen but it still managed to start. Needless to say the past week’s stress relief was all negated cause “someone” forgot to use two fingers to switch the lights off. ha-ha
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| Christmas in Florida 2009 |