Florida, I’m thinking about you. I tried to write something against Texas once, but it proved to be too big a state and for every bad thing I could find in Texas I found three things that were wonderful. Florida, however, walks the fine line with me, the fine line between ‘state-o-morons’ and ‘state-o-wonders’. Florida is a vacationer’s paradise. In Florida one can find a total of four Disney theme parks, encompassing over 50 square miles of imaginative and magical Disney love. There’s Universal Studios, NASCAR, Miami Beach, and Kennedy Space Center… It’s the latter of the list that’s chiming in my head – that’s giving me the burning urge to write what I’m writing. When one’s about to go on a tour of the Kennedy Space Center, mind you it’s called the Kennedy SPACE Center, what would you assume would be the main focus on the tour? Yep, you’re thinking the way I think. On a tour through the Kennedy Space Center, especially on a slightly pricy tour that brings visitors close to launch pads, assembly buildings, and space shuttle preparations stations, one would expect to see exactly that. One would expect to see, and focus on, titanic monuments to mankind’s greatest achievements – machines built with genius and flown with bravery to space, the moon, and beyond. But no. Lisa and I piled into a bus to tour the greatest and largest and most important landmarks I can ever dream of visiting. The bus was full, and as I quickly learned, full of my newest classification of moron – the Floridiot. In the beginning of the tour, Nick, our guide, drops little trivia about Cape Canaveral. One of the little tidbits of info he chose to disperse was the fact that the cape covers hundreds of square miles of land, but utilizes only a few percent of it – saving the rest of it as a natural preserve for its local animal inhabitants. That’s nice. We’re blasting off for the stars, yet still taking care of the place down here on earth. Very nice… Driving from near the VAB (Vehicle Assembly Building) towards the Boneyard (where the launch structure for earlier Mercury missions slowly rusts away in the grasp of countless vines), the bus slows to a crawl. Lisa and I are sitting on the edges of our seats, our eyes wide open as we just took in all kinds of terrific information. “To our right, ladies and gentlemen,” Nick began, “you’ll see Old Blue, one of our seven resident alligators here at Cape Canaveral.” You would have thought firecrackers were lit under everyone’s asses in the bus judging by how fast they all jumped and swarmed the right-side windows to take as many pictures of Old Blue. That was also, by the way, the first and last time the word ‘alligator’ was used in full. “Old Blue gets his name from the pipe he likes to live under. This gator’s been living under that pipe right there. It’s and old pipe, and it’s blue, and so we call ‘im Old Blue.” Lisa and I looked at each other rolled our eyes back in gross annoyance. The tour went on. We’re driving down a road and to the left we’re being shown the very short, yet very, very, very long building where the Space Shuttle’s drag-chute is washed, dried, and folded. Just beyond the building the bottom skirt of one of the space shuttle’s booster rockets is being transported on a wide open flatbed truck – it’s such a small part relative to the rest of the launch vehicle, yet alone it’s big as a bus. The bus slows again. There’s a lagoon to the other side of us. Nick chimes in again. “To the right is the lagoon that two of our more famous gators, George and Gracie, love to lounge in. And if we go slow enough we might even have enough time to see one come up.” The bus is crawling, the Floridiots with cameras are taking snapshots of water where an alligator MIGHT be, and meanwhile there’s millions of dollars of the coolest stuff I’ve ever seen just on the other side of the bus. Then a pair of amphibious eyes breaks the surface of the water. “And there’s George, ladies and gentlemen.” If it were at all possible, the cameras were snapping off pictures even faster. Then the bus begins to crawl away, slowly, as the cameras being to die down. “Well, actually, it just might be Gracie. Um….. Yep, it’s Gracie.” The alligator itself didn’t change, not did it move, but now that its name is different it must be a whole new animal, and so the cameras burst into action again. I look at Lisa and ask her what the difference is to these morons on our bus between the local zoo and the Kennedy Space Center… Puzzled, all she could do was shrug her shoulders and sympathize with my confusion. Driving down a long road towards the VAB once more, one of NASA’s greatest and most memorable historical landmarks (second only, in my opinion, to the twin launch pads 39A and 39B), we begin to pass a multitude of trees. The bus, once again, comes painfully close to 0mph. “To your left,” good ‘ol Nick revs up again, “you’ll see a row of trees along the edge of the road. Now, not that row of trees, but the row behind it. That row, second tree all the way from the very end… We’re going to go slower so you can see it more clearly…” The bus somehow managed to slow down from the near dead crawl it was already doing. “…if you look carefully, you’ll see a big, big dark spot towards the top. That’s the world’s largest eagle’s nest. It’s over thirty years old and seven feet deep.” Well, I guess there had to be a world’s biggest eagle’s nest somewhere. There has to be a world’s biggest everything, right? There has to be a smallest something, a heaviest something, a longest something, etc… Just so happens that the world’s biggest eagle’s nest is on the way to the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA. The cameras were snapping more at this inanimate clump of branches and twigs that at the living and kind of moving ‘gators’. Something bigger than many building, made of steel and filled with fuels under high pressures and extreme temperatures – all designed and put together to further mankind’s exploration of the universe, and a lump of wood, or an alligator (much smaller and less mobile than the ones I can easily see at the zoo – for less) gets more hoopla. Nowhere else can this kind of, what I believe to be, ignorance be found in such disturbing abundance. Only in Florida. I’m surprised the imbeciles on the bus weren’t handed out safety helmets before getting the on the big scary bus, boxes of juice and a safety straw for a snack, and non-abrasive padded mats for nap-time. Nevermind the greatest collaboration of efforts of all time simply in the name of exploration, WE SAW US SOME GATORS MA! Floridiots, I tell you, Floridiots… ADDENDUM I Lisa and I stopped at a shopping mall while driving from Ft. Lauderdale, where our cruise finally came to an end after a lovely week through the Caribbean, to Orlando. It wasn’t really that long a drive, but we just needed to stretch our legs a bit. Anyway, as we’re leaving the mall there’s a little stand that sold all different kinds of peanuts. Plain peanuts, cinnamon peanuts, salted peanuts, unsalted peanuts, etc. The young girl behind the counter asked us if we’d like to try “the best darn peanuts in the world.” What the hell. We tried a couple flavors and, sure enough, they were pretty good. The flavors offered to us were Natural, Cinnamon, and Salted. Lisa said, “I’ll take a bag of Natural.” I guess that’s fancy peanut-industry-speak for ‘plain’. “No, not nacho,” the girl corrected Lisa, “’natural’.” Lisa and I both, at the same time, “What?” “Oh,” the girl started up again in her light drawl, “I thought you said Nacho. It was hard to tell from your accent.” Lisa and I were stunned. The girl then tried to place our accent to another southern state, but was mystified when we told her that we were from California. Lisa cleared it all up quickly, bought the Natural flavored peanuts, and we split. What stunned us both the most was the fact that there was confusion over the word ‘nacho’ at all. There was no nacho flavor available, nor was there any other flavor that sounded even remotely similar to nacho other than ‘natural’. Knowing this, our young Floridiot should have been able to make the giant mental leap and either A) assumed we said Natural or B) said something like, “Did you say ‘natural’?” Nope, she pressed the accent-as-blame maneuver. Oh, Florida. ADDENDUM II-a Lisa and I spent one night in Cocoa Beach, not far at all from Kennedy Space Center, the night before we went the majestic home of NASA. Across the street from our hotel was a Cocoa Beach/Cape Canaveral Tourist Information Center. “How handy,” we thought, “we can go there and get directions to the space center, and maybe even some news about recent exhibits and such.” So we went in. Not even long enough for us to inhale air after asking for directions to the space center, we were ambushed by two women (each with most of their teeth – ok, that’s an exaggeration but it’s how I think about hicks. Don’t like it? Build your own web site) trying to shove a timeshare down our throats. We explained that we’re from California, and that we’re here only for one night so we can see rockets and such, and that it really wouldn’t be prudent for two kids, just married, to ‘invest’ in any property, in any form, on the other side of the country. They heard our reasoning and pressed us further. “It’s not a time share,” they began, “it’s more of a shared living.” Like that one sentence is going to sway me? Oh, it’s shared living? Why didn’t you say so! Here’s my money complete stranger. Then they offered us free tickets to the Space Center. Our interest peaked once more. “When are you going to the Space Center tomorrow?” “We’re only here for one day,” Lisa explained in perfectly clear, and grammatically correct, English, “So we’re going to wake up early and start our day there when they open at 9:00am.” “Well,” one of the Floridiots began, “all you need to do is come by here tomorrow morning and we’ll give you the tickets.” “What time,” Lisa asked. “9:00am.” Ok. Observation: Floridiots can’t listen. Didn’t Lisa just explain, clearly and precisely, that we’re going to be at Kennedy’s front gates at 9:00am? “Be here at 9:00 and let us show you the property.” “No thank you,” Lisa said, and we walked away. ADDENDUM II-b Just down the road from the ambush time-shared freaks was some world famous surf-shop called Ron Jon’s. I never heard of it, but apparently it’s one of the biggest surf shops in the world, one of Cocoa Beach’s greatest draws, it’s open 24 hours a day, and no matter where you see a Ron Jon’s billboard, even the one that’s a hundred miles away, you see in bold print “FREE PARKING!” Lisa and I went there right after we survived the time-share assault, and started browsing. The shop was indeed big, but anyone that wants to pay ten bucks for a small and poorly printed shot glass might like to by a collection of my fingernail trimmings. Browsing and looking through endless rows and aisles of stuff I’d pretty much never buy, we pass by one of the check-out counters. The man behind the counter was stalling in ringing up two younger girls that just wanted to buy a few small things. What was he delaying them with? You guessed it. TIME SHARES. Oh Florida. You have so much yet know so little… |
