hiya Brett - well now
I managed to witness the STS 125 launch back in May of this year. Viewed it from NASA causeway, absolutely fantastic and incredibly exciting.. I'm trying hard to be happy and enthusiastic for you, but I'm busy fighting off feelings of near overwhelming envy !!
Now I did arrange our visit to the states around a hopeful launch date, knowing that the general advice is ~not~ to plan your holiday around a launch..I'll give you the links to my most helpful websites for you to keep well informed of mission status.
We were at Disney World for 10 days all up, and although I initially planned to have about a week after the initial target date to allow for delays, as it turned out, we would only have a 3 day window with that particular mission..if Atlantis had not gone off within that 3 days, it would have been stood down until about 2 weeks or so later (from memory) - well out of our time in Florida.. but all went well on the day and after much other troubles and last minute glitches (that I'll tell you about ) we saw it launch.
Back with some links soon.