Daytona Beach

Sunday, July 10 - I forgot to include in yesterday's blog that we finished our marathon day on Friday,after the shuttle launch and our naps, by going to the movies.  We saw Larry Crowne (Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts) and we liked it.

Today we debated about staying here at this state park another day or moving on, and didn't seem to be motivated either way, so we stayed here.  We drove back down to Daytona Beach this morning and did the shops and the boardwalk and the beach.

 This wasn't quite how we remembered it from 1974 -- apparently a lot has changed since then.  But you can drive on the beach here, so of course Joe had to do that.  We drove a 6-mile stretch right at the boardwalk, and another small section later.  They have sections of the beach marked off for traffic and no traffic, so you can just drive between the sections.  Joe did mentioned that by driving the beach we weren't getting much exercise, but we were seeing more beach.

It looked like a storm was brewing so we didn't get in the water here.  And sure enough, we heard the beach patrol gal blowing her whistle and clearing the beach, and then the patrol jeep came through.

Because there was lightning, they made everyone get beyond the traffic lane.  So here's the empty beach and the clouds.  It did rain for a while, but not very hard.

As we drove along the beach, we saw a couple of pretty good sand sculptures -- a turtle and a mermaid.

We stopped for lunch and then the grocery store, and then headed back to camp.  We actually did some housekeeping, I vacuumed and Joe shook out rugs and checked the batteries.  Finally, we decided we should go walk the beach since it was only 80 degrees outside, so we put our swimsuits on just in case we braved the water.  The tide report said the water temperature here  at Flagler Beach is in the mid 70s.  We finally decided to get wet, although Joe whined the whole time he waded out, then a wave took him down so he got completely wet.  It was a little brisk out there. 

We are heading out of Florida tomorrow.  We've been in this state for 6 weeks and we have really seen a lot of it, done a lot of things, and had a great visit with John and Bridgette.  And we got to see our nephew Mike and his family, so we'll leave Florida with very fond memories of our time here.

Daytona

Saturday, July 9 - We headed up I-95 this morning about 20 miles, then cut back over to Hwy 1, which is also known as the Dixie Freeway, so we've been with Dixie for several days not.  (I've been trying to take a picture of this highway sign for days and just today finally got one.)
We worked our way over to A1A again and followed this scenic highway, but most of our view was blocked by condos with just an occasional glimpse of the ocean.  As we crossed the causeway, we went over Bird Island, which was literally exploding with birds.

When we got to the entrance to Daytona Beach, we turned to go over to the Daytona International Speedway so we didn't actually go down to the beach here.  You can actually drive on this beach, which we may come back and do.

We found the racetrack and took the "All Access Tour," which lasted about 2 hours.  This place was really busy today with lots of people from the shuttle launch stopping by to tour.  Joe called Jeff just as we were walking in to see if he wanted to give us his credit card number so we could buy tickets for all of us for next year's race, but Jeff didn't seem willing to do that.  This monument is Mr. and Mrs. William France, who designed and owns this track as well as Talladega (and maybe some others). 

We took a tram ride that took us to the garages, pit road, the lake, drivers meeting room, broadcast booth -- we saw the entire track and all of their facilities.

This track has 31% banking in the corners, and there was an "exhibit" that demonstrated how steep that really is.  The Petty Ride or Drive-Along was taking place here today, and we saw some of those cars driving on the track.  Joe got to do this Ride-Along in Phoenix a couple of years ago.

Here's the driver's meeting room, and us in Victory Lane.

They also have motorcycle and motocross races here, and an entire Bike Week.  Ricky Carmichael, the winningest motocross rider ever who is now driving in the NASCAR truck and Nationwide series, designs the track for the Supercross Race here.  Bridgette and John are big fans of Carmichael.

The view from the broadcast booth was pretty awesome -- you could actually see the whole  2 1/2 mile track, the same as the Brickyard in Indianapolis.

The tour concluded with a video presentation of all of the Daytona winners crossing the finish line, then we got to walk past Trevor Baines' car that he won this year's Daytona 500 in. 

We spent about 3 hours here, but got on the road again shortly after 3:00.  We headed up to Gamble Rogers State Park at Flagler Beach right on the beach, where they had one campsite left that would fit us, and we could not reserve it.  Fortunately, it was still available when we got there, which only took about 30 minutes but we drove through some heavy rain for a few minutes.  We got set up and walked over to the beach, and the water was surprisingly chilly -- much colder than it was just 100+ miles south at the last beach we were at, on Hutchinson Island.  But it is very pretty here.

We were still tired from our early morning yesterday, so we had an early night.  But I got up about 7:00 this morning, and when I opened the front curtain and saw the sun over the ocean, I, of course, had to go take some more pictures.

This is a pretty nice campground, and it's the closest to the ocean that we've got to camp, so we're feeling pretty lucky.

Atlantis Launch

Friday, July 8 -- We made it!  We got to see the shuttle launch.  Wow, what an experience.  We got up at 3:00 a.m. to try to get a spot.  We drove up to the Space View Park, which was probably about 20 miles.  We must have gotten there to late to get the free parking because they hit us for $30 to park, but we got to park pretty close.  We walked around the park, checking out the situation.  It was already pretty full, lots of tents and people sleeping on blankets.  We walked over next to a bank and found what we thought was a better spot, so we walked back to the car and got our chairs and stuff.  And settled in.  It was now about 4:30 a.m.

We were under a streetlight, so Joe got his book out and read for a while, and I kept trying to doze off. We could barely see the lights on the launch pad across the river, and once it got light, we could only see the launch pad framework through binoculars.    Time went very slowly, but it didn't rain on us at all.  The crowd kept getting larger, and we moved over to a different spot when people in front of us raised their Easy-Up and blocked our view.  It was cloudy, so we didn't know if the launch was going to happen or not.
Daylight came about 6:00 a.m., still 5 1/2 hours to go. Here's the crowd in daylight, and the view we were watching across the river.  We saw 2 military jets and a NASA helicopter fly over, and a hovercraft (we don't know if this was military or not) kept patrolling the far side of the river.  There were several boats of different sizes out on the river -- they had the best view of all.

 Some people moved in beside us with a portable radio, so we got to hear what was going on from time to time.  Finally, the countdown started.  And stopped.  And continued.  Everyone was on their feet.

There's people everywhere now.  The cops blow a whistle every so often to get people to move off the street, but it seemed otherwise that they were allowing them to park about anywhere there was a hole.  Some of these people had huge cameras with them, and tripods.

And here it goes!!!!

Way cool!  We actually got to see it for several seconds before it disappeared into the clouds.  And the vapor stream hung around for quite a while.

 

We could have used Joe Myer's camera for this day.

We got back to the RV in about an hour, so we thought that was pretty good, considering the traffic.  And we slept all afternoon.  We had McDonald's breakfast sandwiches at 3:30, hamburgers from a park vendor at 9:30, so I'm not sure what meal is next, but I'm up from my nap, it's 5:00 p.m., so I should probably wake up Joe and fix us some dinner.  But what a day this was!

On to Cocoa

Thursday, July 7 - Today is a travel day, so we headed out to fuel ($3.459/gal here) and hooked up with Mike at McDonald's for a breakfast sandwich.  We took the very scenic A1A north through Melbourne, stopping here to walk over to the beautiful beach.

So you can see the sky was pretty cloudy, and we hit rain shortly after this rest stop.  The beach is very accessible along this route, with many parking areas, boardwalks over the sea oats to the beach, and restrooms and showers.  The waves were pounding in here pretty good, and there were a few surfers out.

A fisherman here had 4 poles in the water, but he never had any action while we watched.  We were hoping he would pull in something exciting, but no luck.

Part of the scenery here on this highway are the variety of mailbox posts.  We've seen lots of dolphin, manatee, and even some seahorse mailbox posts here in Florida, but we came upon some new ones today -- turtle, tiki hut, pelican, mermaid, lighthouse, iguana, and even a huge conch shell.  If we have time here (if the launch gets postponed) I hope we can find a subdivision with some of these that I can get photos of.   We continued on our way, on through Cocoa Beach where we had toured last month when we came over to the Kennedy Space Center, then headed over to the town of Cocoa and our campground.  At the stoplight where we were turning, a car beside us said it all.

We got to the campground about 3:00, and they were ready for us with registrations (and patriotic-ly decorated cupcakes) because they were expecting to be very busy.  They led Joe to the parking space while I got us registered, and the rain started then.  I got a ride in a golf cart to the RV to stay dry, and we hunkered down and watched it rain for a while.  We know the launch is very iffy, but we are keeping our fingers crossed.  And the plan is that we are getting up at 3:00 a.m. to go over to the Space view Park to try to find a parking space.