Dave and I are in Florida this week. Today we went to the Kennedy Space Center and did the behind-the-scenes tour where you get to see the two shuttle launch pads, the crawlerway and other cool stuff. I think the Vehicle Assembly Building and crawlers were the best. The former is a single enclosed space containing the volume of three Empire State Buildings, and has the most ridiculously huge doors on any building anywhere, designed to let something the height of a Saturn rocket exit the building while *upright*. The tour guide told us that before they managed to create a working ventilation system, the building's interior had its own weather system -- clouds would form in the upper part and it would sometimes rain inside.

The crawlers which transport the shuttles to the launch pads were almost unbelievable. They weigh six million pounds each, and can carry twice that weight, so you potentially have eighteen million pounds moving along the crawlerway. This is paved with seven feet of river pebbles, which apparently act like ball bearings; a concrete road would be crushed. *Each* of the plates making up the treads on the crawlers weighs a ton. This tour, in short, was a machinery-geek excursion into the world of REALLY, REALLY BIG STUFF.

There were alligators scattered all over the landscape and signs along the roadside saying "Caution: This Drainage Ditch Is Infested With Poisonous Snakes." Nice place. I got a couple of very good closeup photos of a little gator.

Afterwards, we went to a place that has some way cool space simulators, most of which were pretty lame and aimed more at kids, but it was worth the trip because I got to go in the g-force simulator, where you are strapped into a tiny dark enclosed fighter-jet-cockpit simulator with the world's BEST flight simulator video playing in front of you, and they basically whirl you around on the end of a stick until you puke and die. I mean until you get up to four gravities. It doesn't feel like you're spinning around horizontally -- it feels like you're flying the jet fighter. It was AWESOME. This simulator is supposedly as close as you can get to the actual experience of being in a jet fighter doing barrel rolls, loop-the-loops and straight flight at those kind of speeds. I was doing just fine until they sent the "jet" into a spin pointing directly at the ground from what felt like about fifty thousand feet up. That made me feel a bit queasy and I never quite recovered during the rest of the "flight".

I have been in fairground gravity rides before, so I knew what to expect in purely physical terms -- that good old "face being sucked off, windpipe collapsing, and internal organs being slurped backwards against your spine" feeling -- but fairground rides have NOTHING on this simulator for the sheer thrill of incredibly high-speed flight. Probably one of the most fun three and a half minutes of my life so far.

Tomorrow we're going to a theme park with major rollercoasters so that opinion might be revised soon.