On the 1st, I left Doylestown headed towards the Space Coast in Florida. Before I'd started out from California, I'd planned on stopping in the Atlanta area to visit with a friend I'm working with on MyNetwatchman.com; however, our schedules didn't intersect. I'd got a long sleep the night before and I felt good, so I decided to just drive all the way to Florida overnight. The other factor in expediting travel was that the upcoming holiday weekend presented two really bad holiday travel days. My experience has been that on just Sundays during the summer, the roads are filled with distracted drivers. I wanted to miss as much of that as I could, to getting to Florida on July 2nd would allow me to avoid the holiday traffic the next day.
I went back out on the Pennsylvania Turnpike out to the Harrisburg area and retraced a route that I drove last summer. I took Interstate 81 from there down to Interstate 77 along the Virginia / North Carolina border. From there I drove through North and South Carolina to Interstate 26, which took me back over to I-95. I got to Titusville at about 7 am on the 2nd where I got a hotel room for the night. Having got to town a day early, I was able to catch the Delta II / Contour launch overnight of the 2nd/3rd, though I was still trying to catch up on sleep; the launch was still quite interesting from Titusville, but I learned later there are better places to watch those launches.
Over the Independence Day weekend, I met with several people from the InsideKSC E-group. Rick Fischer is the moderator of the group and also hosts the InsideKSC website. Since late last year, I have been posting video clips that Rick has hosted on his site. For this weekend, Rick and his wife Kathleen hosted several of us for a get together at his house in Merritt Island. It was fun to chat with other "space cadets" like me; unfortunately (and probably predictably) I lost track of time and forgot to take pictures.
Then it was time to get home for Dad and Vicki's 60th birthday on July 11th. Justin and Carla flew out from New York to surprise Dad and I wanted to be there, as that would be the best present I could give. I left Cocoa, Florida just before lunch on Sunday, July 7. This was the other driving day that I wasn't particularly looking forward to, so I took it easy and waited for the late night/overnight to arrive. Amazingly, the traffic was surprisingly good. The only problem was rubbernecking just outside of Mobile Bay in the evening. I drove through the night and into the morning, going the familiar Interstate 10 West route through southern Louisiana and then taking a jog to the north that I done once before to get back up to Interstate 20.
When I drove through Texas a couple of weeks earlier, it was just really hot. Since then, tropical rain had parked over Texas, particularly over the San Antonio area and just west of there. The road there (I-10) was reportedly flooded in places, so I decided to go back to Interstate 20 to go around the floods. Before that, though, I stopped for a rest just outside of Dallas. In the afternoon, I got up and started out to finish the trip, which I did mid-morning the next day, July 9th.
Justin and Carla arrived in Orange County the day after that, the 10th, and I drove up to meet them that evening, since I figured Dad would have figured out that I was coming. We had a nice and typically quiet weekend:
Last Revised: 18 July 2002
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