Christmas Lights

The Great Outdoors RV Park, Titusville, FL

Christmas comes to TGO. People here are into lighting up the holidays in a big way and with big bucks. We made several evening trips around the park enjoying the work of the residents. Some pictures illustrate the point.

Watching Christmas lights in a light jacket (or no jacket) is hard for me to get used too. But Christmas is a beautiful time wherever.

Christmas Kickoff

The Great Outdoors RV Park, Titusville, FL

This is our first Christmas in Florida. For me as a northerner, phony snow does not mask the fact that the warm climate takes away from my holiday spirit. However, it is what it is. Here at TGO the Christmas season starts with a parade of golf carts decorated for the season.

Ava in the Nutcracker

Fayetteville, NC

This past weekend we left TGO (without the Cougar) for a visit to Fayetteville, NC. to see Ava perform in The Nutcracker with her dance class. She was excited and so was her stage mom (and Grandma).

Ava had two parts. First she was one of the children at the party:

Then she was a mouse:

Christmas wouldn't be complete without the Nutcracker.

Let me know what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars....

Kennedy Space Center, FL

Rare treat today. We took the short drive over to the Kennedy Space Center to watch the launch of "Curiosity". We didn't go into the Center, just stopped along the road close-by (along with a zillion other people)

Here is the newspaper story

NASA Launches Super-Size Mars Rover to Red Planet

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA. – The world's biggest extraterrestrial explorer, NASA's Curiosity rover, rocketed toward Mars on Saturday on a search for evidence that the red planet might once have been home to itsy-bitsy life.

It will take 8 1/2 months for Curiosity to reach Mars following a journey of 354 million miles.

An unmanned Atlas V rocket hoisted the rover, officially known as Mars Science Laboratory, into a cloudy late morning sky. A Mars frenzy gripped the launch site, with more than 13,000 guests jamming the space center for NASA's first launch to Earth's next-door neighbor in four years, and the first send-off of a Martian rover in eight years.

I got these few pictures on my phone camera.