Space Center Adds Up-Close Tours

by Chris Owen on

While Kennedy Space Center will not be launching space shuttles anymore, the 39-acre complex in Florida has not shut down for lack of anything to do. In addition to ongoing space programs, travelers visiting the Space Coast of Florida have some new options with up-close tours, some that were never before possible in the 50 year history of the facility.

“You’re going to be close to where history has been made and will be made in the future with new programs currently under development for space exploration,” Bill Moore, chief operating officer of the center’s Visitor Complex, said in a Los Angeles Times story.

Kennedy Space Center has added new access to previously restricted areas, including Launch Complex 39 where space shuttles and six Apollo missions took off. Called “KSC Up-Close” a choice of three walking, guided tours bring a deeper look at specific aspects of Kennedy Space Center.
In June, Gadling featured the Launch Control Center (LCC) tour that gets visitors inside Firing Room 4, one of the LCC’s four firing rooms and the one from which all 21 shuttle launches since 2006 were controlled.

Other tours offered include the Vehicle Assembly Building tour, where visitors are granted access to the secure area, and the Launch Pad tour that goes nearly a quarter-mile within the perimeter security fence of Launch Pad 39-A.

All guided tours are $25 per adult and $19 per child (ages 3-11) plus tax and can be reserved online. Reservations, while not required, are suggested as tours sell out every day.


Flickr photo by mehul.antani

iPhone Travel Apps Ranked By Actual Usage

by Chris Owen on

iPhone Travel apps have been coming at us rapidly for quite some time now. Everyone seems to have their favorites, based on a variety of factors. Some iPhone travel apps are easy to use, quick to load and produce good results. Others, not so much. Knowing which one is most effective can be difficult but a new infographic takes a stab at sorting it all out.

Onavo is a data compression tech company that helps iPhone users get more from their data plan. How apps load and run is a topic they know all about. To feed this infographic, Onavo ranked travel search and booking apps by the percentage of U.S. iPhone users who activated them at least once during June 2012.

Onavo generated these infographic statistics using a sample of 100,000 U.S. iPhone users of their free iOS data-saving app that helps avoid overage fees.

“Acting as a proxy server, the Onavo Extend iOS version compresses data sent to your device from apps and websites, which means less bandwidth consumption,” reports Toonz.

[Flickr photo by mastrobiggo]

A Traveler In The Foreign Service: Making Peace With Malta (Mario Speaks!)

by Dave Seminara on

Regular readers of this column will recall that I created a diplomatic incident with Malta by dressing up like Colonel Gaddafi in a grammar school model U.N. in Buffalo, New York, in 1986. A photo of me in Arab garb made it into The Buffalo News and once the Maltese got wind of it, they were none too pleased. In their indignant response, Mario Cacciottolo, the private secretary of the Prime Minister of Malta, told me that I should try to correct the misperception I’d created regarding their country.

I tried to do that, 25 years after the fact, earlier this summer. (Read Parts 1 and 2 of this story.)

I never found Mario and assumed I never would but the Maltese press got wind of the story and found the incident as hilarious as I did. Daphne Caruana Galizia, a popular columnist for The Malta Independent, wrote about it on her website and the post generated more than 40 comments, including at least one from a person who believed that I’d forged the documents and made the whole story up. (My imagination is vivid but not that good.)A reporter from the same publication wrote a piece about my attempts to find Mario, which concluded with my line: “Sorry, Mario. Please drop me a line someday. I owe you a beer.”

With Malta being a relatively small place, the story found its way to Mario himself and several weeks ago he finally contacted me via email. I was initially a little alarmed, because in the first paragraph of Mario’s message, he seemed more than a little annoyed with me.

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“The affair of the Gaddafi costume had been forgotten until you brought it up again last year, and to tell you the truth I was not at all pleased to have my name and (former) address published in the international press with a repeat in a local newspaper,” he wrote. “I only hope that the affair stops here.”

But after those lines, he warmed up considerably. “There are no hard feelings, and I was really gratified by your great efforts to find me, to ‘make peace’ in person,” he wrote.

Cacciottolo, now 71, went on to explain that I had “earned” an explanation of what had transpired back in 1986 and again last year when I asked the Maltese Embassy in Washington to contact him on my behalf. Mario wrote that he responded to a series of questions from the Maltese Ambassador last year, forwarded to him on my behalf, but he was unaware of the fact that the Embassy never passed his response on to me. (In fact, they told me that he didn’t want to speak to me, which wasn’t true.)

Cacciottolo went on to claim that he didn’t understand back in 1986 that the matter concerned a schoolboy but maintained that he had “no shame or regrets for what I had written back in 1986!”

Given the fact that Mario referred to the photo of me, at age 13, in the letter, his confusion is, well, confusing, for lack of a better phrase, but I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But Cacciottolo also insisted that his reaction reflected no specific anti-Arab bias, but rather a patriotic response to my mischaracterization of the country.

“We may be a very small nation living in a tiny state,” he wrote. “But we are as proud of our country as anyone else in the world.”

Mario also took issue with my characterization of the mid ’80s as a time of violent protests in Malta.

“No demonstrators were EVER killed in the streets by Maltese policemen,” he wrote. “Don’t be offended or shocked, but you repeated a lot of exaggerated hogwash.”

He also insisted that the source that briefed me on what Malta was like in the mid ’80s must have thought I was a C.I.A. agent. But after setting me straight on those scores, Cacciottolo apologized for not realizing back in ’86 that I was just a 13-year-old schoolboy, and said that he’d be looking for the card I left for him with his former neighbor.

Since receiving that first message from Mario, we’ve exchanged a few more emails and I feel pretty safe in saying that we are now friends. Someday, I will buy him a beer. The only bit of unfinished business is the fact that his former neighbor apparently ate the box of chocolates I left for him. Note to neighbor: you owe Mario a box of Lindt chocolates.

Part 1 and Part 2 of this story.

Read more from “A Traveler In The Foreign Service” here.

I Found My Silver Lining At Grayton Beach State Park

by Elizabeth Seward on

My husband and I were wandering down the East Coast with our two dogs. We had just made an unplanned visit to West Virginia to be with my family during a medical emergency and, as a silver lining to the sudden and stressful trip, we figured we’d meander down the Atlantic and across the Gulf on our way back to Texas rather than traverse the highways we already knew so well; the ones that run through Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas. We didn’t have much of a plan, but we had a bed in our van and a small list of dog-friendly beaches we’d be passing through.

%Gallery-160758%But by the time we reached Jacksonville, we were over it. One dog had already climbed up onto, and proceeded to puke off of, the lofted bed and onto everything we had with us in the van, causing us to pull over in a random rural driveway in Maryland. We cleaned out the car as best we could with bottled water. We drove to D.C. in search of a 24-hour laundromat and we ordered Chinese takeout as we waited for the laundry to finish. The smallest bill I had was a 20, and with no attendant in sight to give me smaller bills, I walked away with $20 in quarters. In Virginia, I woke up to the smell of reeking Chinese food in the parking lot of my gym with a tow truck parked beside me that didn’t pull away until I entered the gym. Once I was in the gym, a cop came and talked to my husband after a call had been placed reporting that I had left my dogs in the vehicle unattended. I hadn’t. We arrived to a park we’d been hoping to camp at in Wilmington only to find out there wasn’t any vacancy. We stopped at the Highway 21 drive-in movie theater in Beaufort, South Carolina, and woke up to a flashlight in our faces at 2 a.m. and a voice asking us to leave. Everyone else had cleared the field and in our exhaustion, we didn’t even see the movie we’d come to see. The iPhone had gotten us lost more than once and if that wasn’t bad enough, we got into an accident in Savannah. The car endured a few thousand dollars of damage, but it was still drivable. No one was injured and everyone involved was polite, especially the officers, so we went on our way to Jacksonville. And we were beat. We made our way over to the park we’d been looking forward to, but we were 10 minutes late and they wouldn’t let us stay. The men working directed us to another park and when we finally arrived there, we found out it was a community playground, not a place to camp.

To hell with the romantic detour, we decided that night. We agreed to leave town early and just drive straight to Austin. Still, I noticed Grayton Beach State Park on the map as we drove through the panhandle. We got there in time for sunset and although we only spent 20 hours there, that park was our silver lining. The dogs weren’t allowed on the beach, so we had to spend our beach time separate. I went first, inhaling more deeply than usual during yoga postures. With my feet rooted in the wet sand and the sun setting to my right, I felt as though, for the first time in two weeks, I could breathe. With each crashing wave that was lapped back up by the ocean, my muscles loosened. My head fell to the ground before me and, just like that, I let it all go.

We got delicious takeout that night from a little Italian place near the beach called Borago. We drank big pours of wine and whiskey at the bar while we waited for the food. We took the boxes back to our campsite and with the headlights turned on and shining toward us, we dined at 10:30 p.m. at the picnic table.

We continued west in the morning. We stopped at the KOA Baton Rouge on our last night of the trip. A woman in an especially sour mood greeted us. She scoffed at us for having a bed in our car and seemed intent on not letting us stay at all until a colleague of hers shooed her away and took over. He told me about his plans to drive straight down to Panama soon. He used to live there and is eager to return. Were it not for the reprieve we found in Grayton Beach State Park, the kind of “hospitality” the KOA woman showed us would have, I am guessing, broken my last nerve. But that 20-hour vacation is just what we needed. It was enough to redeem the two weeks that preceded it. It was enough to keep me focused on the drive to Panama this man would soon be making.

Canon Offers Free Photography Workshops In US National Parks

by Kraig Becker on

Camera manufacturer Canon has once again teamed up with the American Park Network to offer free photography and videography workshops in U.S. national parks. These workshops, which include video for the first time, will be available in a variety of locations and offer park visitors a chance to learn new skills, or hone existing ones, in some of the most photogenic environments on the planet.

The Photography in the Parks program has already been wrapped up in the Grand Canyon, Zion and Yosemite National Parks this year, but new opportunities begin in other parks as early as today. For example, workshops in Yellowstone run from July 21-31 and are held three times daily. Anyone wishing to participate can join in the fun at 8:30 a.m., 12:30 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. at the Old Faithful Lodge. Participants are encouraged to arrive 15-30 minutes early. Other upcoming workshops will be held in Grand Teton National Park (August 1-2), Rocky Mountain National Park (August 5-11) and Acadia National Park (August 18-29).

Instructors will be on hand to provide tips on how to get the most out of your digital camera or camcorder. They’ll also have a variety of Canon products available to test as well, including their wonderful EOS DSLR cameras, EF lenses, PowerShot point and shoot and Vixia camcorders. Those expert photographers will demonstrate fun and creative ways to capture the exact photo you’re trying to achieve.

For more information check out the Photography in the Parks website and start making your plans to sit in on one of these classes soon. This is a great opportunity to get a free workshop that could improve your travel photography skills.