Picture Post, Sunday November 11, 2007

Here are some more photographs taken at Space View Park in Titusville, FL. This is a bit more of the same park as the photos in yesterday's post.

The Mercury Seven Astronauts

I was going to post about this tomorrow, Sunday, but I have ended up with so many pictures about this subject that I'm making this a two-day post.

As a little boy, I was totally caught up in the whole space race thing. I remember sitting in my Dad's lap to watch Neil Armstrong step onto the moon.

I was born in 1962 and was too small to really know about or appreciate the Mercury astronaut era and the men involved.

Up in Titusville, Florida, near the causeway where I took the photos of the rainy evening and the choppy water that I showed on Wednesday, is a public park where there is a monument to the men of the Mercury program.

Here's a few pictures with hand prints and info about each of the original seven US astronauts.









More photos of this park tomorrow. It's a really pretty place despite the rather overcast evening that appeared when I was there.

Hi! Welcome To Sunny Florida

This past Friday after work I wanted to go take some photos, because it will be a long time before I get off work before dark again. (Of course, click on the photos to see them enlarged in all their rainy glory.)

It was an absolutely glorious day. It's getting to be the best time in Florida for the next four or five months. Cooler but still beautiful and sunny.

I left work heading north to Titusville, Florida to go to a couple of parks I'd never been to to try to find some interesting things to photograph.

There's a causeway up there that crosses the Indian River Lagoon and goes onto Cape Canaveral. As long as the shuttle isn't on one of the launch pads, the road is open to drive on Kennedy Space Center. (That's part of the causeway there in the second photo. The bridge is low and therefore it was made a swing bridge that pivots to allow tall boats and sailboat masts to get through. Nifty to see working.)

Now the Space Center and Titusville are 40 miles (64.5km) north of my home, though I was leaving from work, a few miles north of where I live, to head up there.

It was a race against the sun, I wanted to get there in time to take some photos in the beautiful evening sunlight.

I get ALMOST THERE, and within the last three miles, three lousy miles I kid you not, it gets cloudy and starts raining. From unspeakable beauty to low, overcast, and rainy in three minutes flat.

I'm the Rodney Dangerfield of the photography world.

I went over the causeway and waved at the Space Alliance union members on strike at that gate to Kennedy Space Center and turned around and headed back to a possible place to eek out some photos, rain or not.

The photos I sprinkled through this post are some photos I took along the Max Brewer Memorial Causeway.

I didn't get too wet, and after this I found a park with a memorial to the Mercury 7 astronauts that I'll post photos of this coming Sunday for my Sunday picture post.

Just wanted y'all to see that it's not all sunshine and turquoise water here in the so-called Sunshine State.

Brevard County is seventy miles long, so I was nowhere near exiting the north end of the county even though I was 40+ miles from home.

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I had a 5,000 word day yesterday to catch up for the couple of days I missed on my bucket of chum gloriously wonderful novel for NaNoWriMo. Desperation really helps make the words flow.


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