Blast Offs

'Sup, gangsters.

Recently Kris and I came to the realization that Abby is nearly 13 months old and still hasn't gotten the chance to hit up the beach. That may be another stroke of 'Bad Parenting' on our parts, it may not. With Alayna, we had her out to the beach three weeks after she was born. Couldn't wait to get sand in that kid's umbilical cord. With Abby? Not so much.

But, as you all know, Abby's the second child... which more or less means we don't care as much this time around. The novelty of having a kid wears off. Real quick.

Whatever.

It just so happened that, as we were thinking about our beach-oriented parental negligence, it also came to our attention that the shuttle Atlantis - last of NASA's shuttle fleet - was going to be launching. Now, we had already said to ourselves, "We have to hit this one up - it's the last one." We've lived down here in Florida for four and half years, and we've seen about a half dozen shuttle launches... all from our vantage point in scenic Orlando.

This time around, we wanted front rows seats, so we decided to drive out to Cocoa beach on the Atlantic coast, a short distance south of Cape Canaveral and the shuttle platform. The local news networks were saying that over a million people were estimated to come out for this last shuttle launch, so Kris and I knew we'd be driving into one hell of a mess. We left Orlando about two hours earlier than we needed to (the drive usually takes about an hour), because we factored in bottle-necking and idiot drivers.

After a few stops on the highway, we got to the beach with about an hour to spare (the drive back was a completely different story - it took us 3 1/2 hours to get home with all the traffic. Thank God we have a DVD player in the car). So we tried our hands at the usual beach business - build a sand castle or two, have a couple beers, throw the kids in the ocean, have a couple more beers, etc.


Behold:

Attempting to get the girls in the water...

...and again.

So, after about 45 minutes of trying to get our kids to splash around in the waves, Atlantis, last of NASA's shuttles, blasted off from Cape Canaveral:

The End of the Shuttle Program

And here's a few more pics of Abby's first day at the beach, and the aftermath of the Atlantis launch.

Enjoy.

- Brian