Thwarted Again

Video from the Atlantis launch from the cameras on the Solid Rocket Boosters.

Separation as seen by different cameras at 2:20, 7:00, 18:10 and 23:05 is awesome.

I’ll just start this with a link to the Vacation gallery. Linkies

Pictures from the “Behind the Seeds” tour through some of the Epcot greenhouses.

I spent the last two days doing non-stop theme park tourism. We went to Universal Studios on Saturday. It was a pretty good time. The Harry Potter section was the best part by far. They seem to have spent more time and care on it than the other areas although I will say that the big tree house / jungle gym thing in the Jurassic Park area was a lot of fun as well. All in all it was better than I expected it to be.

Sunday we went back over to Epcot and Eileen’s friend Juliet got three of us into the park for free again. She actually spent the morning in the park with us. It was fun to go around the park with her. She’s friendly and cheerful and seems to genuinely like her job and her company. She really fits in there. We got to see one of the event rooms backstage and a couple of conference and meeting rooms which was cool. We also went on the “Behind the Seeds” tour which is a walking tour through the Epcot hydroponic greenhouses where they grow a lot of the vegetables and some of the fish they serve in the resort.

It was overcast most of the day and we got rained on a little but that actually makes for a good visit because it keeps the heat down. We stayed and watched the fireworks at the end of the day and then I bought a t-shirt with a mouse on it. 12 full hours in the park.

I managed to not do any work at any time in the last two days which would be good except for the part where I have reviews that were due last week that are not done. Hopefully I will be forgiven for my tardiness. I’m going to try to get a little done on the plane but I’m rarely very productive on the airplane. At least I don’t have a bunch of laundry that needs to be done when I get back.

I almost didn’t go on this trip because knew it was going to be expensive and difficult to fit in and all that. I ended up having a good time and the launch was awesome so it was completely worth it. There may be something to this vacation thing after all.

You can view all of these in their natural habitat at the gallery page. Comments at the bottom.

I took this video with my bicycling video camera:

Wes took this video with his phone:

Today was an exciting day. The weather, which had been threatening to ruin everything all day, calmed down and cleared up enough that during the hold at T-00:09:00 during the go/no-go check the SRO said weather was go and Houston said go on the launch return site. Then with 31 seconds to go a switch failed that was supposed to indicate that one of the retractable arms was actually retracted. They broadcast the resolution as it was happening over the loud speakers and then they turned control over to Atlantis’ on-board computers and off it went. Nothing like a little bit of last minute drama. Also the picture of the lift-off above was the last picture that my memory card in my camera would hold. So that was lucky. It seems like everything that could have gone wrong today went right instead with the exception of drive back. It actually took about the same amount of time to get back to the hotel as it took me to fly from Austin to Orlando including the connection in DFW.

Go Atlantis!

So awesome. More later.