STS-124

Another long overdue blog.

Wow, what a long weekend, but well worth it. 2131 miles in a weekend. 33 hours of driving, and very little sleep.

DJ & I left Altoona around 6pm. We would have left a little sooner but fortunately in my rush to get everything packed, maps printed out and locations entered into "Fritzy" (the nickname Leanne gave my GPS when we were in Puerto Rico, but that's another long overdue story), I forgot to change the oil in my car on Thursday. That turned out to be a good thing because the mechanic noticed that my air pressure was low in one of my tires and discovered there was a nail in it.

We stopped at Sam's Club and bough a case of Red Bull and headed out. We arrived in Jacksonville Beach at my Uncle Bud & Aunt Jenny's place about 9am the next morning. We slept for 3 hours then Uncle Bud drove the 3 hours to the Kennedy Space Center. Then we had to wait a hour for the launch. The whole launch lasted about 5 minutes. That may seem like a long drive for a 5 minute 'money shot' but it was well worth it. They are going to retire the Shuttle program next year and I wanted to see a launch while I could.
Then it was back in the car for the 3 hour drive to Jacksonville Beach. We ate at a wonderful local seafood place before heading back to Pennsylvania.

The drive down wasn't to bad. I drove the whole way by myself. The trip back was a different story. I tried to drive as long as I could but my vision started to go blurry. So Dj and I switched off driving. It seemed like I could only go a hour before I got tired again. We had offers to stay in Myrtle Beach & Washington DC if we needed a nap but we just wanted to get home. I don't even remember what time we got home on Sunday, it was some time around 4PM, I think.

On the way down I listened to some astronomy podcast on my iPhone. One of them was about Einsteins Theory of Special Relativity. I have heard lots of people talk about it and have even discussed it with some old guy in the Bull Pen who kinda looked like Einstein, but I never completely understood it until about 4am that morning while listening to that podcast. Being the geek that I am, I was excited that everything finally clicked.

I hope you enjoy my little youtube video of the shuttle launch. I also posted a few pictures of our trip on my mobile blog. I took pictures with my phone and sent them to my mobile blog as I took them.