Cocoa Beach, Royal Caribbean Cruise and WDW vacation - Day 2 - Kennedy Space Center

Kennedy Space Center

When we were originally planning this vacation we started with the cruise. Let’s just try a few nights on Royal Caribbean to see if we like it as much as Disney. It would open up more (and often cheaper) itinerary options for us. Then we started building other portions of the trip around it. I knew one thing that I wanted to do was to visit the Kennedy Space Center and this is the main reason we flew in two days early instead of one day early like we normally would with a cruise.

I had done a little research online and found that, like many tourist attractions, earlier is better and visit Atlantis first so that’s what we did. They opened at 9 AM and we were there right around that time. I had already pre-paid for parking online so that was taken care of and I also had tickets so we were able to bypass the ticket windows and head straight for the turnstiles.



We went right away to the Atlantis building where you begin by watching a video in one room, then you’re moved to another room for a second video and I’m not going to spoil it in case you ever go there because the presentation of that video and the way it leads to the rest of the exhibit is absolutely stunning and genius. I almost got a little emotional! It was phenomenal.



We spent quite awhile exploring the exhibits, speaking with the docents (former NASA employees) and riding the launch simulator. They also had a slide that was sort of ridiculously fun, even for me and I may have gone down it more than once.



After we were done there, we made our way to the bus tour (included with admission) which took us all around the launch areas, past the immense VAB (vehicle assembly building), the crawlers (that take the rockets to the launch sites), and the crawler track (a specially designed track that the crawler uses) and to another set of exhibits related to the Apollo missions. They had the Saturn V rocket, an Apollo capsule, space suits and many other items on exhibit, as well as a memorial to the Apollo 1 astronauts, a moon landing theatre experience and more. While there, we ate lunch, which was actually halfway decent for that sort of thing. Then we took the bus back, again oohing and aahing at the huge size of the VAB (seriously, that’s a gigantic building).




We finished up with the rest of the exhibits such as the astronaut hall of fame and the rocket garden and we watched two different IMAX movies, one was about Apollo 11 and one a more general space exploration movie. We thoroughly enjoyed all of it, finally leaving around 5:30, having spent the entire day there, from opening to nearly closing.




As we were making our way back to Cocoa Beach, dark clouds were beginning to roll in and when we arrived at the restaurant we chose for dinner, things were looking rather ominous. While we were being seated at Jazzy’s Mainely Lobster and Seafood (much, much better meal than the night before) the sky opened up with a serious storm with rain, wind, lightning and thunder.

When we were done with our meal, we really wanted to return to Fat Donkey for ice cream, but the rain was still coming down, though slightly less than before. We decided if we could get a close spot, we would go and then we could just order (they don’t have an interior, it’s just a little window on the side of a building) and race back to the car and enjoy our treats in the car. We were lucky and got a very close spot so that’s exactly what we did.

After finishing our ice cream, we returned to our little house and got things packed and ready to start the next portion of our adventure the following day.

Click here for Day 3.