We enjoyed a lovely dinner at the Keg with Bob and Nancy and the girls and then went home with the kids’ excitement levels being tweaked up a notch with the reducing time until our scheduled departure. We cleaned house, booked a taxi and tried to get four children to go to sleep. Emily simply wouldn’t. Thomas was trooper and the first one to the land of sleepy bo-bos and even Michael and Sam went to sleep. But Emily was a right little bugger and only fell asleep about an hour before we intended to leave for the airport.
At the scheduled time we peered out the front window waiting for the taxi, but 10 minutes after it was due to arrive, there was no sign of it. Caroline called the taxi company and they said that they’d send another one as quickly as they could.
I started waking the kids up, which was an effort and a half. Talk about out to the world. You seriously have to wonder about the effectiveness of a smoke alarm with kids when you’re in their room all but yelling over the alarm that’s going off and still not being very successful. Sam has taken to sleeping with one quilt under him and another over the top and as I woke him up, he started pulling the top one back over the top of him. I dragged it off him, only to have him sleepily start to drag the ‘under-quit’ up over him instead. I had to drag that off him as well and it wasn’t really until I started to bodily pull him from the actual bed that I started to get any sort of responsiveness that one could relate to being awake.
A short time later, with still no sign of any taxis I started to stuff our luggage into our car. The taxi showed up as I was working on bag #3 and so we quickly transferred it, stress levels rising as we attempted to get everything we’d packed, plus the 6 of us into the minivan cab. We made it without anyone losing any limbs and arrived at the airport in plenty of time to catch our flight.
Of course the next issue was the fact that there’s an in-flight entertainment system, kids that have had just enough sleep to boost them and desperately tired parents (and kids, even if they won’t admit to it). The first flight was about 4 hours in duration and despite threats, bribes and every other trick in my arsenal, Emily simply would not sleep. Knowing that at the end of the flight we’d only have 3 or so hours in the Toronto airport before another 3 or so hour flight down to Miami and that at the end of that flight, I had a 4 hour drive to look forward to, I wasn’t really coping very well.
Emily spent almost the entire flight awake, of course only really nodding off at the end so that I had to practically carry her sleep-walking style, up the aerobridge and into the terminal.
By the time that we’d collected our luggage prior to customs, Emily was of course falling asleep every 3 steps and any time we paused, she’d simply drop where she stood and attempt to sleep.
For the second flight, she sat next to Caroline and I managed to get enough sleep to survive the drive to Orlando without incident. Finally we were at our hotel.
Now if only that were the end of the bone wearying itinerary, it would have been ok. As we’d left Miami for Orlando, we’d stopped to do some shopping, picking up some blankets, chairs and food because a mere hour or so after we arrived in Orlando, we were due to be picked up and taken to the Kennedy Space Centre.
Yes, there was a shuttle launch scheduled and we decided that it was too good an opportunity to pass up. We made it to the space centre and arrived to the strains of our guide Milton telling us that not only was this the last ever scheduled night launch for the shuttle, but that he’d never seen so many people ever show up for a launch. It was packed. As a consequence, by the time we managed to get in the gate and take a quick turn at the launch simulator, it was basically time to line up to get back on the bus to go to the causeway where we’d be watching from. After carrying the chairs and blankets around all night, it was good to get some respite, when we finally made it onto the bus, about an hour after we had originally been scheduled to. We’d started the evening with something like an 80% chance of launch, but by the time that we were on the bus, it was down to about 60%.
Out at the causeway, we managed to snag our own piece of real estate, one row back from the rope and with a view of the little speck of illumination that was the shuttle on the launch pad.
(Click on the pic to Enlarge)
We snuggled up as warm as we could manage, the wind working hard to chill us to the bone (because we came to Florida for the sun of course) and us with an eye to the sky as the early morning started quite clear, but gradually clouded over.
Clouds would drift in and drift out, but the chance of launch was being continually cut. When it was down to 30%, I still had a confident feeling that things would work out for us. The clock continued to count down, we continued to freeze. We made it all the way down to the T-9 minute hold without any mechanical incident to halt proceedings and sat with our fingers crossed.
We took a few pictures, feeling somewhat camera-inadequate as we stood amongst thousands upon thousands of enthusiasts with camera equipment worth the price of a small third world nation and between the distance, lack of a tripod and the limitations of our camera, did the best that we could:
(Click on the pic to Enlarge)
And then came the words we’d feared. The launch had been scrubbed. The cloud cover was too low and quite simply, the shuttle wasn’t going to fly. So at 4:30am after travelling since 12:40am the previous day, we packed our weary kids and bodies back into the bus, faced with the question … if it was only delayed 24 hours, would we stuff our hands back in our pockets and drag ourselves out there again?
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