jumpingfish

So we finally managed to connect to the motel wireless in Cocoa Beach. It turned out that we just needed to sit outside by the picnic tables so that we were closer to the base station—too many brick walls in the way, otherwise.

Mind you, it’s not that we were jittery without a fix or anything like that. It’s just that … well there was some online business we each had to attend to.

So we sat there at the picnic tables clicking on our keyboards while the waves crashed on the other side of the dunes and the cool breeze of evening settled in and patches of blue peeked thru the uncertain clouds.

It didn’t take long.

When we were done, we walked back across the green lawn under the palm trees to put the computers back in our room and grab our chairs and go down to the beach and sit and read and wiggle our toes in the sand and watch the patches of blue sky come and go and marvel at the cruise ships dipping below the horizon and the Black Skimmers with their orange beaks flying by, scooping at the shallow water.

We walked back to our room planning to do those things. And we passed a woman sitting ourside her room with a laptop on her lap.

Trudy walked up to her and whispered, “I’m so glad we’re not the only ones.”

The woman looked up at us, and her eyes widened, and she held up her hands.

“I’ve got work to do!” she said.

Well, at least we weren’t doing work.

The waves crashed on the other side of the dunes. A cool evening breeze blew. And patches of blue peeked thru the clouds. We dropped off our laptops in our motel room and headed down to the beach.

1. The Kid on the Sidewalk

We were on our way to Waffle House for breakfast. (We always have breakfast there when we’re in Cocoa Beach. It’s a kind of addiction.) So we were driving north, and we passed a kid on the sidewalk.

He was holding a plain white sign that said, “Launch Photos” in bold, black letters and had an arrow pointing into the strip mall nearby. The boy held the sign over his head and waved it around, shouting something that we couldn’t hear.

2. The Man at the Counter

At the counter in the restaurant, an old man sat next to Trudy. He was treating his grand daughter to breakfast. He’d left her brothers at home playing computer games, he said.

He had lived in Cocoa Beach for years and talked about seeing rocket launches and about the Space Coast economy now that there are no more Shuttle flights. He talked about how folks in the space business have such specialized jobs that they don’t know what real work is, how it’ll do them some good to have to find real jobs.

At that point, I tuned their conversation out, not particularly caring about the philosophy of a haggard geezer who leaves his sons at home playing on computers while he goes out for something to eat.

It wouldn’t have surprised me if he lit up a cigarette right there at the counter and coughed a wheezy cough as he blew smoke over the rest of us, except that they evidently don’t allow smoking in Florida restaurants, anymore.

He and Trudy continued talking. I ate my cheesy eggs and hashbrowns, lost in my non-charitable reverie.

3. Searching for Souvenirs

The man at the counter did tell Trudy about a different man who sells space memorabilia in a little strip mall store on Highway 3. It was just the kind of place we were looking for. When we got up to leave, we looked over to thank him, but he was gone.

So we drove over to Highway 3 to buy some souvenirs. But when we got there, we couldn’t find the place. We drove up and down the highway looking for a stripmall with a souvenir shop nestled next to a diner.

We found lots of strip malls. We saw lots of little shops. We even saw some diners. But we couldn’t find anything that fit the description the man at the Waffle House gave us.

Eventually we gave up and headed back to the motel.

4. Finding Launch Photos

On the way back, that kid was still out by the street waving the “Launch Photos” sign over his head. I turned into the parking lot, but there was no obvious place selling photos.

So I walked over to the kid and asked about his sign.

“Are you selling Shuttle pictures?” I asked.

“Yes!” he said and turned back to the oncoming traffic, shouting “Launch Photos!”

“Where do we get them?” I asked.

He turned back to me, as if I had asked the strangest question. “Right over there,” he said, pointing to the strip mall on the far side of the parkling lot.

“One Hour Photo.”

“Thanks,” I said and turned back to the car.

“One Hour Photo,” he said again. “One Hour Photo!”

I laughed and thanked him again. Trudy and I got back into the car and drove to the other end of the parking lot.

5. One Hour Photo

There was nothing special to see at first inside One Hour Photo. There were portraits of families and kids on the walls behind the counter. But if you turned around, there were big space pictures, many addressed “To Karl” and autographed with big swirly signatures.

There were a handful of Space Shuttle prints sitting on the top of a glass counter, but they were classic photographs from over the years that anyone would recognize.

My heart dropped. Clearly this was a bit of a bait-and-switch, I thought. He wasn’t selling photos of yesterday’s launch but just selling photos of previous launches. I was not too surprised. What did I expect in less than 24 hours. And after all, this was just a little photo shop in the back of a strip mall on the far side of an empty parking lot.

6. The Photographers

“Do you have pictures of yesterday’s launch?” I asked the man who greeted us as we looked around the store.

“Of course,” Karl said, “right there.”

He pointed to a counter where we saw half a dozen pictures. “Just printed them,” he said, and he explained the various options. Which photos. What sizes. How many. The prices.

We chose one, a close-up photograph of Atlantis climbing out of the billowing steam and smoke, and he helped us crop it before he sent it to his $250,000 photographic printer.

“Been here for 23 years,” Karl said. “Taken photos of lots of Shuttle launches.”

When I told him I’d been at the first one, his face lit up.

“I was there, too,” he said. “I was sixteen.”

I was ashamed of my thoughts of bait-and-switch and looked again at the personally autographed photos on the walls. Pictures signed by Gemini, Apollo and Shuttle astronauts. Autographs written out to him by name. This guy was for real.

As our picture came out of the printer, a guy came in the back door and walked up to Karl and showed him a picture on his iPhone. Karl was visibly impressed.

“It was the only one I got,” the guy said.

Karl introduced us. This was Larry Tanner. Google his name online, they said. You’ll find the image of a nighttime Shuttle roll-out that he took from the roof of the Kennedy Space Center firing room. It became an instant hit online.

Larry showed us the Atlantis launch picture that he had just shown Karl.

I asked if we could buy the photo that Karl had just printed and also one of Larry’s.

“It’s fine with me if it’s ok with him,” Karl said.

“Is it ok with you?” I asked Larry.

“Sure.”

7. The Photographs

So we bought two 8×12 color photographs.

Karl signed and dated the one he took. Larry signed and dated his. Mind you that the two of them weren’t standing by their cameras when the pictures were taken. As Larry said, if you can read the writing on the side of the Orbiter, then the camera was triggered remotely. Can’t have anyone that close to a launching rocket.

So we left with our two pictures slipped inside a cardboard sleeve, happy that we had really good souvenirs from our trip.

As we drove back to the motel, we talked about sitting on the beach and wading in the water. And I took out the pictures and marveled at them but then noticed that both had a thin vertical line running down the middle, the kind of digital flaw that old 17″ Sony Triniton monitors used to have (back when 17″ was really big).

My heart sank as I looked at the pictures. Good souvenirs but not perfect. I tried to convince myself that they were good enough.

But they were not good enough, and so we called One Hour Photo from the motel room. Karl answered, and I explained. He said he’d have to look at the photos to see if he could fix them. And he said he’d be there until 2:00. It was 12:30.

So we got back in the car right away, drove back thru Cocoa Beach, passed a different kid waving a sign at oncoming traffic (another of Karl’s four sons, as it turns out) and walked back into One Hour Photo.

He didn’t have his glasses on before, he said. He was glad we’d called, because he found dust on the mirror in his $250,000 photographic printer. He was able to clean it off, and would print the photos again. He ripped up the flawed ones that were still sitting on the counter.

As it turned out, he had worked a bit on Larry’s picture and managed to squeezebetter contrast out of it. The sky was darker and the booster flames were more orange.

We sat down to wait for the new prints to come out. When they did, Karl signed his. Larry was gone, but we’ve still got the first one that he signed.

And we do have two souvenirs of our trip. Two really good ones.

1. The Bad News

Her face went blank. Something was not right.

The fair and industrious Trudy was on her cell phone with the Sea Aire [link] in Cocoa Beach letting them know that we were two hours away. She wanted to ask them if they’d still be in the office when we arrived.

She closed her phone and looked over at me.

“The woman was confused,” Trudy said. “She was looking for the paperwork and said they’ll call back.”

We drove along under gray skies in the rain, and eventually her cell phone rang.

“Hi Gary,” Trudy said and listened for a while in silence.

“Well I don’t know what to say, Gary,” she said. “I have an email from you that I printed out before we left. It says that you made our reservation for today.”

2. What Happened

So it turns out that somehow Gary wrote down our reservation a day early in the motel calendar, even though he confirmed the correct day with us in email. And on that day we were driving down Interstate 10 somewhere between Houston and Tallahassee.

He said that he tried to reach us on the phone. He said that he called and he called and no one answered, which was of course because we were hundreds of miles away, speeding along the highway.

And when he failed to reach us, he cancelled the first day of our reservation and gave it to someone else. There was no room for us that night, and there were no available hotel or motel rooms anywhere in that part of Florida, because everyone was coming to watch the Atlantis launch.

As Trudy said, “I don’t know what to say,” because we certainly didn’t have the faintest idea what we’d do when we arrived.

3. How Gary Fixed It

Gary told Trudy that he’d find a place for us by the time we arrived. He told her that on the phone as we passed Daytona Beach still driving under gray skies and rain.

When we pulled into the motel parking lot and stepped across the puddles to get to the office, we found him there with a nervous smile on his face. He welcomed us and shook our hands, and he explained his proposal.

“I’ll sleep upstairs tonite,” he said. “You can have my apartment for the night. Is that ok with you?”

Our eyes widened. We smiled and nodded and said yes. And the nervous look on his face melted away.

So he took us to see his apartment in the motel. The floor had just been mopped, and there were clean sheets on the guest bed.

“The refrigerator’s a mess,” he said, and he gave us his key.

In less than an hour, we were fast asleep.

1. Bed

“This bed is so comfortable,” Trudy said as she rolled over in the morning.

I mumbled in agreement. There’s nothing like a king side bed (even if you don’t get all of your half).

2. Cereal

“This is the best raisin bran I’ve ever had,” said Trudy as she drank the last of the milk in her bowl.

I sat down at the table nodding and spread the cream cheese on my toasted bagel.

3. Egg

“This egg is so good,” Trudy said, finishing off a hard boiled egg.

You can’t go wrong with hard boiled eggs, and we’ve got two in our ice chest for the road today. So I nodded in agreement.

4. Biscuit

“This biscuit is so good,” Trudy said, wiping the jelly off her fingers.

I smiled. And I nodded.

5. The Bottom Line

As we walked down the hallway back to our room to get our suitcases and set out on our last leg to Cocoa Beach, I turned to Trudy.

“Are you enjoying the vacation,” I asked.

“I am!”

“Did you pack eight days of clothes?” I asked the fair and industrious Trudy.

She looked at me silently for a moment and then answered, “Yes.”

I was wondering if she was thinking that we’d stop and do laundry at some point.

“My suitcase isn’t large enough for eight days of clothes,” I said, regretting again that I’d bought that compact little thing instead of one size larger.

She looked at me silently for a moment and then answerd, “We have lots of other suitcases and duffle bags.” And she pointed at the closet behind me.

It was late. Of course, I thought to myself somewhere in the recesses of my lizard brain, we’re flying Southwest [bags fly free].

That was last night. This morning, after the mammal brain in me had a chance to sleep, when I looked at our suitcases packed full of clothes and the laundry basket filled with shoes and other miscellaneous bulky things that we are taking with us, I realized why she gave me the silent looks she did.

You see, we’re not flying Southwest. And we won’t be checking any bags. … Because we’re not flying. We’re driving. And the car will have lots of room—plenty of room for eight days of clothes.