On Voyages Near and Far
How this unexpected outing inspired us to keep going
“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
- President John F. Kennedy
On Day 3 of our odyssey, on July 3, after our intense night adventure, we had another rainy day, so we decided to stay in the Space Coast and went back to the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge to take the kids to the Kennedy Space Center. The US government acquired this large barrier island off the coast of Florida in 1962 for NASA. A year later, in 1963, they protected this ecosystem teeming with wildlife and turned it into a National Wildlife Refuge. Today, this complex, which includes Cape Canaveral, situated just across the Banana River, is the world's most active spaceport.
As we rode out on their official bus tour to the historic Launch Complex 39, the site of the Apollo Space Shuttle launch that took humans to the moon, we watched wild ospreys soar by, hunting for fish. On this small parcel of land jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean, you catch a glimpse of both the Earth’s past and future, with the most innovative man-made technologies ever imagined set against the backdrop of the natural world as its creator designed it.
It’s an awe-inspiring place, and we both felt a surprising surge of patriotism on the eve of America’s Independence Day as we marveled at two of her greatest ideas: the conservation of what we have through our national park system and the exploration of what lies beyond through the space program.
It required 2 million unique systems working together perfectly to get a man to the moon. We’re not going to the moon, but Alaska might as well be at this point. We’re still in the early stages, and it’s all a bit daunting at this point, processing this huge change while juggling the systems and daily tasks of RV life, taking care of the kids physically and emotionally, planning routes, driving, laundry, cooking, finances, our marriage, health, and where we'll sleep again tonight?
We don’t have 2 million systems, but there’s a lot to think about on a given day. We hadn’t planned to go to the Kennedy Center, but this trip to the space center gave us an unexpected and much-needed boost!
