Fresh Squeezed to the last Shuttle

The Trip Turns North

The sunshine state greets you with a cup of fresh orange juice. It’s a long haul across the panhandle and I was surprised how extensive and dense the pine woods are. We made an impromptu stop at a roadside turnout that provided some shady benches and a boat ramp. There was our first gator. Our goal was Tampa, where we planned to take in the Clearwater Threshers (http://web.minorleaguebaseball.com/index.jsp?sid=t566 ), but on the way into town we saw a billboard for a churrascaria (http://www.texasdebrazil.com/ )

and, well, you can only do one thing at a time. The food was great. The price was not, but, hey, you go into debt with your credit cards only once.

South we went, around Lake Okeechobee. We entered the Seminole reservation and went to see Billies Swamp Safari (http://www.billieswamp.com/rates.html ) Another disappointment. They had non-native birds on display and want you to take the full day package at $50, when all we wanted to do is ride an airboat.  We had a mediocre lunch and left. The Seminoles sport the national colors of Germany and seem to have some sort of real good source of income. Unlike on many reservations I’ve gone through, here the houses are lavish, two big fat SUV’s in every car port and a palm thatched picnic roof next to every mansion. There is a casino, but it does not appear very busy. The staff at Billies Seminole Safari were all white guys.

To make up for the missed game, we headed to the East coast and catch the Marlins take on the Mariners, with some hope to get Shaun Figgins’ attention. Turns out, the Marlins now play their home games in Seattle ! Yes, the series was moved to Safeco field to make room for some U2 concert; seems that was a financial decision. The franchise will make more money that way and we were left holding the bag (screw the fans at home, too). Is this some strategy by the owner to reduce fan attendance below a threshold, get out of the contract with the city and move to Cleveland? (sounds like a movie plot to me)

Tropical showers, sometimes heavy, had moved in, but we resolved to drive an hour North and take in a game hosted by the Jupiter Hammerheads. It was all you can eat night. Man, were they going to make a loss on us ! (http://web.minorleaguebaseball.com/index.jsp?sid=t479 ). It was drizzling when we got to the stadium and they were bravely pretending the game would go on. We hung around a while, but eventually left, because the inevitable did happen; it was rained out. We did not have much baseball success in Florida.

I asked the motel clerk about a good Cuban place to have dinner at, She promptly suggested “Las Vegas”. I informed her that wasn’t funny and we’d just come from there. There are no Cuban restaurants in Las Vegas. No, the place is called Las Vegas and it was a cross between fast food and real dining. The food was outstanding and the service very genteel, gracious and attentive. A bunch of old men kept coming in for meals and it was clear they were feeding their homesick souls. The music matched the flavors.

Off to the Everglades. I had the brilliant idea to sneak in on a spur road that leads to a campground North of the main entrance and picnic there. After quite a bit of a drive, we got there, only to discover that the place was closed for the summer season. Those national park nit-wits didn’t have the wherewithal to post that useful bit of information on their sign out on highway 997. I finally located a couple of guys cooling their heels inside a lavish and well air-conditioned fire station and they confirmed the fact. Seems only foreigners (mostly Germans and Swiss) and country bumpkins from Oregon are foolish enough to enter the glades in June. The park is nice, but Big Bend was better. We only saw a couple of gators, but the mosquitoes are oppressive. I didn’t know mahogany trees were once prevalent in the swamps. We tried our picnic at another site

, but the intense heat and the bugs drove us away. Unless you have a boat and one of those beekeeper type bug suits, the park is not that interesting.

The East side of the glades is a region full of tropical nurseries and fruit plantations. I had no idea so much exotic fruit was grown here; papayas, bananas, lychee, mangoes, avocado (the big, Brazilian kind), coconuts, etc … I loaded up on some big mangoes + a bag full of lychees.

I had never had a fresh lychee (small red fruit)  The shells pops open with a slight squeeze and the white meat surrounding the pit is sweet and delicious. The taste lingers. I am saving the seeds. Maybe I can raise some in Morro Pintado.
 (https://picasaweb.google.com/MorroPintado/MorroPintado2010#  ) Speaking of which, we have some papayas there.

Cape Canaveral is another expensive tour, but this one we didn’t skip.

It’s still a very lavish operation, despite being fairly obsolete. Due to ‘security concerns’ you can no longer approach the interesting sites, nor enter the assembly building. HSA type security is in full bureaucratic  bloom here and must have added a nice layer of make believe work to the federal payroll. If terrorists want to damage a working space program, they’ll  go to Baikonur. In fact, they’re building a new port in Russia: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10698433

We should turn ours into a nature preserve. That’s partially already true. Cape Canaveral sports 21 eagle’s nests, lots of gators and wild pigs, all three of which of which we saw during the bus ride. The last shuttle is sitting on its pad

 and only a few of the launch sites are still operational, but there is a fleet of a hundred or so air-conditioned buses ferrying tourists around, plus all the attendant staff, displays, I-Max shows, space burgers, etc.  And they’re not very nice, either; when we were in the queue for the bus

 I asked the attendant if we could have the handicap seats because Ferdinand is an amputee, giving Ferdinand more space to accommodate his leg.  She actually asked, “Are you kidding me?”. She then had the temerity to suggest he be placed in a wheelchair like the fat lazy ass self-disabled and be hoisted up a hydraulic ramp into the bus;  more about Florida hospitality later.

NASA drones on about the Apollo program. It’s all you see and hear about.

I guess that’s their only shot at keeping funding. Not a word, nary a display, from Voyager, the Mars rover or any of the other truly interesting things they have done in the last few decades. That’s way too scientific, I guess. Four, count ‘em, four times,  the tour guide pointed out viewing stands and locations where only “VIP invitees” would see the last shuttle launch. Seems to me, the most important folks would be those who paid for it. Where is the free admission and hot dogs for the unwashed crowds of tax payers?  Yeah, turn this into a nature preserve and leave some relics of the space program standing around, with a self-guided (free) tour  and we’d have a good thing there. I was once pretty pumped up by all that moon shot stuff and Kennedy did inspire the nation to do something truly difficult. All we have is nostalgia now. We need an inspiring national aspiration. The war on drugs is not it. The wars to force democracy on medieval societies is also not going so well. The green jobs initiative will inspire legions of spongers and corporate welfare tricksters.  Great societies have great dreams. All we’re now getting is nightmares.

Lunch was at a nice Mexican/Cuban place in Titusville that had a wonderful poison green plastic coconut out front.

 It was raining pretty good and that added to the atmosphere of decay and abandonment. Titusville, like most of the towns we drove through, bore the hallmarks of decay and retreat; boarded up businesses, shuttered shops and houses for sale. All that a few miles up the road from a place where the tour guide tells the marks that cell phones were a byproduct of the space program. How do I know that this is BS? The key components of all that digital wireless stuff are the narrow bandwidth frequency filters developed by Rockwell Radio (the Cadillac of radios), a division of Rockwell. I know , because they offered me a job on the team back when I finished my BS.

Now just North of the Kennedy moon shot nostalgia center is a very good National Wildlife Refuge and we went there to take a dip in the North (ok, North to us) Atlantic. We saw more gators there than anywhere else on the trip, including this sweetheart who was blocking the dirt road we explored.

Green camo gators, too

The beach was great (and it’s cheap to enter). The shuttle is visible just down the coast. This is the place to be to see the launch.

They have hundreds of yellow stakes marking sea turtle nests. You can see them if you enlarge the picture here:

 We both had a very nice swim. Our best experience in Florida, I’d say. So far, the state had the rudest, pushiest and aggressive drivers along the route (I know, wait ‘til New York) and the service attitude in a bunch of places like motels and restaurants is terrible. Seems like the wrong coast version of California (but with better fruit and better Latin food.)