Le secret d'ennuyer, remarked Voltaire, est de tout dire: "The trick of being a bore is to say everything." Let me risk that sobriquet by rambling on a little more about Cape Canaveral.
I learned while there, for example, the answer to a question that has troubled me for many years: why, after being Cape Kennedy for quite a while, is the launching site in Florida now called Canaveral again?
Cape Canaveral, although associated in the global mind with satellites and shuttles and such things, is a name that appears on the very earliest maps of North America.
The Cape was named by its Spanish discoverers, Canaveral, meaning "Sea of Canes" or some such thing - a presumed reference to wild sugar cane. Rocket experiments started there in 1950, and space activities followed.
When John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963, the name of the Cape was changed - with unseemly haste, some said - to Kennedy.
Almost immediately a local brouhaha arose. Residents of what used to be Cape Canaveral said it was a shame to remove such a historic name from the map.
In time the authorities succumbed to local pressure, and in 1972 Cape Kennedy officially became Cape Canaveral again. However, the Kennedy Space Center, at Cape Canaveral, still retains the presidential epithet. While in Florida, I also had the novel experience of being driven down the entire length of the 15,000 ft runway, familiar to us from television, on which the shuttles land after their sojourns in space.
The runway has a high camber; it is some three ft higher along its centre line than it is along each edge, a profile designed to minimise the amount of rainwater lying on the surface. As a result, the central portion of the runway has a depth of six feet or more of solid concrete.
This provides an excellent storage heater. Heat from the Florida sun is retained efficiently long after dark, a fact which has not gone unnoticed by the local wildlife.
Every night, alligators, snakes, wild pigs and other animals, arrive in considerable numbers to snooze on the runway, basking in the comfortable warmth oozing from a surface that has been kindly provided, so it seems, for their convenience.
A consequence of this is that shortly before every night-time shuttle landing, an employee of the Kennedy Space Center has to travel the length of the runway rudely awakening the snoozing heat-seekers and shooing them from the shuttle's path.
Or so they tell us anyway, although we never seem to see that happening on television.