If New York is the city that never sleeps then
Orlando is the city that just sleeps. Winding my way back to the international
airport from Titusville after a shuttle launch and not having a real sense
of how far away from the city proper I was, I resorted to the old standby of
anticipating the city lights as I drew near except that everyone apparently goes
to bed a 9 o'clock in Orlando so there was no city light. And why does a city
with such an obvious moniker for the airport designation-ORL-choose to go
with MCO? Turns out that Orlando international was originally a B-52 base of
considerable importance during the Cold War and is named after a pilot-McCoy
(Aha, MCO) who flew out of there. It was also the airport where the OTHER U-2
pilot shot down during the Cold War, left on his last flight to Cuba from-lots of
street names for Armstrong and Grissom in the neighbourhood, but I didn't see
anything for this poor guy. But I guess there's probably not too many streets
named after Gary Powers either. I knew that somewhere near the airport (how
could it be anywhere else) was a decommisioned B-52 bomber that had been made
into a memorial park honouring the people and the planes that had originally
flown out of Orlando but no one including the hotel staff- a few blocks away from
it- were aware it existed. Fortunately a shuttle bus driver put me onto the right
heading and after a bit of driving about the airport I found the park at the back
of a service road on the edge of the airfield.. Only in America will you find a
flower bed that spells out the name of a heavy bomber in carefully planted
bunches of colourful pansies.The B-52 never fails to impress even when tucked
away at the back of an airport.
