Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Lift Off

If you've been reading me, you know I'm a space nerd. Flight and astronomy.

It wasn't always that way.

I mean, in 1977 (?), I saw the first, though non-functional shuttle, Enterprise, on the runway at Kennedy Space Center.

My dad woke me up early one day, while we were on the west coast of Florida and drove just the two of us to Cape Canaveral. The day changed me.  Oddly enough, four years later we were back in Florida, still on the west coast and could see the launch trail of the first shuttle flight, Columbia.

However, just eight years before Enterprise, I could have cared less about space or rockets. I wasn't even fully 6 years old when Apollo 11 took off and went to the moon (or a studio in Burbank, if you're a conspiracy theorist).

I. Was. Bored. with it all.

Everything was in black and white. It wasn't cartoons. And clearly, I didn't understand the importance of it all........being 5.

I did nothing but change the channel.......all three of them. Oddly, my parents didn't care, mostly because the exact same thing was on every single station. I'd flip, they missed nothing.  I'm sure I was annoying (yes! past tense!!!), but if they yelled at me, I don't remember.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the lift-off of Apollo 11.

Oh to be in DC.  They have 'converted' the Washington Monument into Apollo 11 (see image above) by projecting onto the monument itself.  I would kill to see this.

....and I'm not 100% sure I mean that figuratively.

Had I known about it, I might have scheduled our vacation a little differently and taken a longer route and detoured to Grabpussyville USA just to see this.

Alas, I didn't know about it and vacation plans are set and still a little ways off.  I'll have to settle for YouTube videos or something, but it won't be the same.



Song by: Mike Shinoda

4 comments:

anne marie in philly said...

THAT is cool with the washington monument.
I was 15 and bored with everything moon back then.
and any intelligent person wants no part of grabpussyracistville right now.

Travel said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Travel said...

I was not quite 11, and mesmerized by the moon landing. I lived in Central Florida for most of the shuttle program, got to the point I couldn't be bothered walking out front to watch a launch. I was at the cape for the first shuttle launch. I saw one landing up close.

Deedles said...

I was 13, caring for siblings and hoping to get fed. Space stuff wasn't important.