Jetty Park, Cape Canaveral

[jplante4]

Continuing with our first year snowbirding, we spent one week at Jetty Park. I made these plans back in August in an effort to catch a rocket launch and scratch one more item off the bucket list. Trying to schedule something around NASA is mostly luck and an exercise in frustration.

NASA aside, the park is a gem. The beach is excellent, the staff is helpful and friendly and there are plenty of things to do. With cruise ships coming and going almost daily, you could sit by the water and just watch that. There's a nice walking/biking path along the perimeter with cut-throughs to the beach (right on the Atlantic) and even a feeding station for the many Ferrel cats on the property. The sites vary from sandy grass with water only overlooking the channel to full hookup shaded sites. No cable, but the OTA channels in Orlando come in fine. Park WiFi (TengoNet) is terrible. Verizon signal is 4G. The only thing we didn't like is that dogs are not allowed out of the campground area.

There are a few sea food places on the channel in "The Cove" - not really walking distance, but if you have a car, there are plenty of places to eat. Kennedy Space Center visitor center is 1/2 hour away ($50/person to get in and $10 to park), and at the Space Coast Regional Airport there are biplane rides and a warbird museum.

Enterprise picks you up on the normal loop for the cruise terminals and there's a no-name car rental outfit in walking distance.

Mid December and there were sites open until the weekend when the place pretty much filled up Friday night. It would be a great place to watch a launch from, but I think you'd have to stay a whole month to see one. An ISS re-supply rocket went up the day before we arrived, but the people who were here said you couldn't see it because of the low clouds.

Guess I'll have to come back next winter.

[Executive45]

You can always tell when a Sub is arriving as the Coast Guard and Navy gun boats start clearing the channel.

[johnhicks]

It's the FBM Eastern Range facility run by the Naval Ordnance Test Unit. Every Trident boat takes a "proving" shot there plus of course there's other testing.

[agesilaus]

Peg Leg wrote:
And for you old salts there's a Sub Pen across the channel. We saw the sub tender Wally Schirra making her way out to sea.

Not a USN sub base so far as I know and I was on subs. The nearest base is Kings Bay in Georgia. BTW the Germans had sub pens back in WWII, we never used that term. But we didn't build underground sub bases either.

I suspect that NASA has it's own submersibles, or maybe NUMA. The only current USN Sub Tenders are the Land and the Cable both stationed overseas.

[Peg_Leg]

And for you old salts there's a Sub Pen across the channel. We saw the sub tender Wally Schirra making her way out to sea.

[jplante4]

Executive wrote:
Oh, they also charge $2/day per pet and their rules say you may not leave them unattended INSIDE your camper....Dennis

Yeah, I saw that and was warned by another rv.net member. I can say from walking around that it's the most ignored rule in the CG.

[Executive45]

We stayed for two weeks and held over two additional days for the launch. The view from the pier was worth it. Funny thing was the first launch. Sitting in bed at 2AM and the whole coach began to shake with attendant roar that continually got louder. NASA had scheduled a launch 3 weeks prior and pressed the button when there was a break in the weather. The second launch was a scheduled one and posted in advance so it was expected, the first was not.

Oh, they also charge $2/day per pet and their rules say you may not leave them unattended INSIDE your camper....Dennis

[Tripalot]

We enjoyed our stay at Jetty Park last January. We were there for a scheduled rocket launch at 5 a.m. one morning. We got up, walked down to the pier with all the other campers and the launch was scraped with less than a minute to go. It was rescheduled for a few days later, but we had left by then.

We would definitely go back to that park.

[agesilaus]

Jetty park is a great CG. As for NASA launches, they always depend on the weather first and second those rockets are darned complicated and things break on them so you never know for sure when a launch will go. I can recall driving all the way over to see a Saturn V launch and it was canceled, they got to the point that Shuttle launches were fairly predictable but those are over and done with.