U Is For Up, Up & Away {Manatee Hammock Campground, Space Cape, Florida}

During April, we're participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. Every day (except Sundays), we’ll be doing an alphabet themed post starting with “A is for Adventurous” and ending with “Z is for Zinc”. We've got a theme for every letter sorted except for Y. If you have any ideas for the letter Y, please leave a comment or email.

When we set off to travel around the States, I expected to see amazing scenery, interesting historical sights and lots of wildlife. But, it never occurred to me that we would see a rocket launch from NASA. Thankfully, a couple of guys we met at Everglades National Park told us that there was one coming up soon on the Space Cape. So off we went to Titusville to see a rocket blast off into the sky. That's one of the things I like best about our unplanned approach to travels - we hear about something interesting and we can set off to do it without worrying about how it fits into the schedule. 

We stayed at the Manatee Hammock county campground conveniently located right on the Indian River, across from the Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral in Florida ($25 a night for full hook-ups). Manatee Hammock is a friendly campground - the resident snowbirds made us feel at home within minutes of setting up camp. The place has plenty of green space down by the water for the kids to run around on, a large fenced in dog park, a pool and a fishing pier. Seems like an ideal place to spend the winter or enjoy spring break with the kids. For us, the big draw was the view of NASA. Just a hop, skip and a jump from our campsite and we had one of the best seats in the house to see the rocket launch up, up and away across the river. 

The launch we saw was of a Delta IV rocket which was deploying a GPS satellite for the Air Force. If you're interested in all of the technical details, you can check out United Launch Alliance's website. Otherwise, you can just look at the pretty pictures below showing the rocket blasting off, arcing up in the sky and the vapor trail left behind.

We saw the Delta IV rocket launch on 25 March 2015.

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