Skip to main content

Last week in 2014 - Exploring Florida

This year around Christ's birthday we decided to visit the opposite coast.   Being California residents it is a hard sell but we wanted to enjoy it with our daughter who had never been to the Sunshine state.

So we spent a week doing the usual - cover as much terrain on land or water - and soak it in along with the abundant sun.  So we began a loop around the state by starting out at the eastern shore in Fort Lauderdale just north of Miami.   It is not as busy as Miami in terms of the population or the variety of food or sand under your feet.   But offers some beachfront cruising opportunities to gawk at spendy (an informal term I use to describe items that are priced purely based on intangible worth which is mostly anything that is not-functional) items and people.

Sampled some very interesting chewy biscotti and a sort of French sounding pastry that was quite alright.  Food in any shape and form to me is not spendy - it is just nutrition in a bouquet of flavors and textures.  I say so and so it must be right.

Next day we decided to drive up north and visit the Orlando metro area.   About an hour east of the city is Cape Canaveral - home of NASA's Kennedy Space center and the only place where men (Amerians) have left this planet to roam on an extra terrestrial body aka the Moon.  It is odd that other planets have named moons while the Earth just has a Moon - kinda like calling your dog by yelling 'DOG'.  But that is okay - we were interested in refreshing some of what I had learned back in the day about achieving terminal velocity to escape the planet's pull.

While I am nowhere close to achieving it anytime soon - it was a brief respite to sit in a simulator and feel like I had left other mortals behind.  Rides were fun as was the viewing of the Space Shuttle Atlantis.  It is very big and by all means very SPENDY.

While the shuttle program as we knew it has been shut down being Spendy and all - there are private companies vying to take a slice of the space travel business (outer space).

More insights and deep thoughts from Florida in another follow up blog..including a visit to Disney's Epcot center.
STS 135 Atlantis was the last mission for this reusable aircraft - now on display at the KSC near Orlando FL
 

Couple of Herons trying to be Heroes (notice one on either side of the culvert)
 

Comments

  1. California is majority Mexican and Florida, majority Cuban.

    ReplyDelete
  2. And it has been fascinating for an Indian American to discover both....lol...while the Spaniards discovered and conquered either coast the American wars like many later annexed both to the Union.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

New England is gleaming in the fall

 This autumn the weather gods cooperated as we took a family trip in the northeast to see six states that qualify or makeup what is known colloquially in America as New England. Mass, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Rhode Island (tiniest state in the union). The outing helped tally up the states we either lived in, visited or have worked in to 47. Guess which three have eluded this intrepid traveling family. Any rate the drive was all in about 1,800 miles and included some memorable geographic wonders or points of interest.  Easternmost part of state of Massachusetts being one.  Furthest drivable road east in Mass being another. Visit to all Ivy League schools (term harkens to a collegiate athletics conference and generally regarded as elite academic institutes of some repute worldwide) is another random bucket list item of which this trip afforded the chance to knock two more of the list.  Dartmouth in Hanover, NH and Brown (and its sister institute the RISD  - school f

Searching for a lavish 'fill in the blank with other adjectives and gender' in bed

 Many of the readers of this blog have experienced this. Strange sounding messages popping up in your text or WA or emails all day long from some exotic sounding locale with an out of this world individual looking for love, sex, money or other paraphernalia to get a high. I mean granted that electronic spamming is a low cost enterprise and all but the sheer volumes and the variety in these exhortations is beyond imagination. Having a desire to engage you in some sort of sexual payola or invest in some arcane crypto scheme must be a profound algorithm that someone from Oklahoma to Odessa is cranking on through the night and watching one in a few million fall for. Otherwise this nonsense would not exist I suspect. It would be funny to watch the lifecycle of some such persona that creates said content and that of a prospect for this invite becoming an unwilling or willing participant. Then that whole thing could go on some social channel and earn likes and subscriptions for someone else a

Lakeside frivolities

 We moved to the Charlotte area not knowing where exactly our new home would be. Turns out it was by a popular lake formed by the damming of the Catawba river which flows north to south in the Carolinas. Local electricity generation utility built a series of dams along the waterway for hydro and couple nuclear plants as well to supply the state grid.  The lake our house butts into is Lake Wylie. While tract home build has picked up in the Carolinas the developer often carves out parcels that they can get their hands on leaving behind privately owned lots that the individual owner may not want to sell. Our house is part of a subdivision but backs into actual lake front yardage that has always been part of legacy family owned properties who chose to build a cabin or getaway and did not sell to a corporation wanting to build in the hundreds. As such we can see the water through the year but it does not afford actual water access.  That privilege is to our neighbors who still maintain thei