More Things I Learned While on Vacation

In my last post I listed four things that I learned while I was on vacation this past week. It occurred to me that I left out a few items I intended to put on that list, so I'll finish out my list with this post.

• My hair must be thinning. I've known for a long time that my hair was receding off my forehead. It would seem, though, that it must be thinning as well, because not only did I sunburn my feet and sides (see previous post), but I also discovered when I got into the shower that my SCALP was burned. That had NEVER happened to me before. The only thing I can surmise is that I don't have as much hair up there as I used to have.
• Hotels should either have a fancy free breakfast or NO free breakfast. On the way down to Florida we stopped at a Microtel. I wasn't expecting a free breakfast at a Microtel, but they did have one, and it was really pretty nice. There were pastries, sausage, biscuits, cereal, fresh fruit, and yogurt. About the only thing missing were eggs. On the way home, however, we stopped at a hotel that advertised a DELUXE breakfast. It ended up being some Otis Spunkmeyer muffins, burned coffee, and a couple of bagels next to a toaster. I think, in that situation, the hotel would be better off to not have a breakfast at all.
• The space shuttle launches are real. I'm still not so sure about the 1960's and 70's moon landings, but I can tell you all that the space shuttle really does get launched. It launched Monday morning at 6:21, so we set our clocks for 6:10 and got up to watch it. We watched the shuttle lift off from the landing pad on TV and then shuffled outside to see it come over the trees in the back yard a minute later. You can see what we saw in the youtube video below. A couple of warnings, though: 1) We had been up less than 15 minutes, so pardon the bad jokes you hear--we weren't completely awake to be more witty (nor apparently to use good grammar, as I hear myself on the video say "It's took off!"). 2) The video camera we have is not of professional quality. It didn't have a manual focus, so it's kind of hard to see clearly what's going on in the video. In person, I can tell you that from our vantage point several hundred miles away from the launch site the space shuttle looked a lot like a jet you might see high in the sky on a clear day (you know, the kind where the jet looks like a little dot and you can see a trail of white behind it), with three exceptions. First, the shuttle was about five times the size of a jet you'd see high in the sky. Second, it was a bright orange/yellow instead of the white of a jet. And finally, it was moving across the sky A LOT faster, maybe ten times as fast.

(I can't see the video.)