Sunday, January 27, 2013 (Cocoa – yawn….):

            No yawn…just kidding!  I hate to keep saying we woke up to a beautiful, warm, sunny day…but we did!  I feel so bad for all our friends and relatives up north and out in the Midwest, but the weather here is really, really nice!  Actually, I just don’t see how it could get much better – it’s almost perfect.

            So after breakfast, we did a couple of boat putterings around and then piled in the car and drove over to Cocoa Beach.  I really didn’t hold out much hope for this little town – it’s kind of honky tonk with a couple of “adult” entertainment stores (what a way to ruin a place), restaurants that looked like we didn’t want to try them out, and the main drag looks just like any other main drag in the US with lots of car dealerships, Joe’s Automotive Shops, Good Used Cars Sold Here places and various and sundry other dive, surf shops, etc.  But, if you get off the main drag and turn down the road that follows the ocean, the area is well maintained with in-roads that offer convenient public parking for the beach.  You just have to walk over the new boardwalk over the dune and there you are!  Which we did, and it was beautiful!  Nice, sandy beach, not crowded, just enough people to make it interesting, with the usual flocks of seagulls, pelicans, and other little birds pecking in the sand and skittering away as we walked along.  The most surprising thing to me was that the water was WARM!  No kidding, we could have gone swimming!  We really had no idea how nice it would be so we didn’t come prepared to do anything except walk on the beach, but we both remarked to each other that we should have packed a picnic lunch and brought an umbrella and a couple of beach chairs and our books.  This was Bob, actually, saying this, so you know it was really nice!

            After we walked and annoyed the birds, we were hungry so we decided to go back to the boat and have lunch.  We drove around first and actually found ourselves at the Port Canaveral Cruise terminal where Disney, Royal Caribbean, and Carnival were tied up.  I’m not sure exactly what the attraction would be for a cruise ship stop unless it’s the Space Center, but the terminal seemed to be a busy place.  But then we headed back to the boat and spent the afternoon contemplating the next leg of our trip.  We still can’t decide exactly where to wind up, so I think the thing to do is just let the weather decide where we are going to go and what we are going to do.

            Well, since it’s January, it only seems right to watch ice skating on TV, so since the sun has left our flybridge for the day, we will pretend that it’s cold outside and watch the men’s U.S. competition.

            Tomorrow will be spent getting ready to mosey on down the ICW, so I will probably start to have a little more interesting stories to relate again.  This has been a nice place to pass the past two months, and we will return here again in March.  Well, more later…

On the beach

The water is WARM!

Pelican posing

Cocoa Beach