I usually recommend traveling without overcommitting to a specific schedule. Taking a trip on a set itinerary / path may feel reassuring up front, but a lot of my best vacation memories are from times we head into a situation with too little of a plan.
This last weekend was a great example of that. Christina and I had 1.5 days to kill in Florida prior to boarding the Carnival Magic. In the back of my mind, my focus for that time would be hitting some of Florida’s best escape rooms I hadn’t done yet. You can do a lot of escape rooms in 1.5 days!
In the end, we only played one escape room, but we had the most remarkable day and a half. Immediately after landing in Fort Lauderdale, we booked it nearly two hours to the Everglades National Park (Shark Valley Visitor’s Center) to hit their 2PM tour. It was amazing – many alligators, birds, and natural sights.
From there, we decided to head north – many of the escape rooms we pegged to visit were in Orlando, about four hours north of where we were. We settled to drive about three hours before calling it a night, visiting Lake Okeechobee, the huge lake in the middle of Florida, on our way.
It was surprisingly difficult to get a view of the lake! All around the edge of the lake was a manmade land wall, and aside from one bridge that raised us above the wall, we could barely see the lake. We searched, though, and found a nice park and trail where we could climb the land wall to see the magnificent lake.
The last event of the night was the Taken room at Escape Room Vero Beach, close to where we booked a hotel. The room was fun, and I really appreciated the game master doing an exceptional job to adapt to his audience and help us have the best experience.
The morning of day 2, we made a big judgment call. I was shocked to see that there was now a scheduled SpaceX launch in Cape Canaveral that evening. When I checked a few weeks prior, nothing was scheduled- it’s possible this was a reschedule due to the recent hurricanes. Whatever the reason, we had a rare opportunity to see a rocket launch.
Instead of heading to Orlando for escape rooms, we headed to Cape Canaveral to spend the day at the Kennedy Space Center, watch the rocket, and head to Miami for our cruise.
I read online that Kennedy Space Center requires two days to explore, and I’m usually skeptical about claims like that. In this case, the statement is absolutely correct. We spent an entire day at the space center and skipped about half the buildings. We could easily have spent another day there.
The lion’s share of our day was spent on the bus tour / Apollo mission exhibit, followed by the Space Shuttle exhibit. The only other building we were able to visit was the Astronaut Hall of Fame. We missed the deep space exploration building as well as several other buildings with interactive exhibits, not to mention the other to-dos like chatting with a real astronaut.
Our time at the Kennedy Space Center was incredible, and I found myself tremendously inspired. To hear people who actually traveled to the moon telling me to reconsider what is possible makes me expand the horizons of the way I think.
The rocket launch was the perfect way to put an exclamation mark on those statements. We watched the launch from Jetty Park, along the ocean’s shoreline. The rocket’s flames were as bright as the sun, and the roar from the rocket shook the air. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be not only close to the rocket, but strapped to one on a mission to the moon.
The next morning, we boarded the Carnival Magic, and I’d like to use the next several days disconnected from the world at large to take that inspiration and spin it into something useful. I have so many plans to take NASA’s lessons back to daily life now, and I can’t wait to get started.
Back to my original point- I almost didn’t visit the space center, and had I not checked one last time, I would have had no idea that we were in the vicinity of a rocket launch. There’s so much to be said for retaining some flexibility in your travel schedule – you never know when a life-changing experience will make itself available.
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