Where am I? What day is it?
Actually, I am quite sure of all-of-the-above. But we did stop traveling for 36 hours or so. After about 3900 miles, here we are near Clarksville, TN, very close to the Kentucky border. We’ll be taking a ride to Fort Campbell, which I hear is pretty vacant as most of the men & women have been deployed to Afghanistan.
Ahead of us is about 650 miles to suburban Milwaukee, where we can unpack for a few weeks.
Behind us are some incredible memories. Including but not limited to…
3 hours standing in the I-10 “parking lot” 4 miles from the AZ-NM border. (not a great start)
The Houston Museum of Natural Science was awesome- and Houston was a great city to see & visit.
Kiln, MS is really a small town (but it’s Brett Favre’s hometown so it was our little Mecca).
The Mobile Bay Ferry is really cool even on a sweltering day.
Florida A1A is not the same as it was 30 years ago when miles and miles could be driven with an unobscured view of the coast. Now you have to get quick peeks between homes as you drive by. Sad.
But I was right about Miami. It’s been calling me for almost 30 years. I loved it. The vibe comes from so many sources. Little Havana, South Beach, Coconut Grove, Downtown, Key Biscayne. Radio playing Cuban, Carib, Afro, R&B, everything.
The weather was gorgeous. The giant cumulus gathering way out on the ocean. The breezes that were so cooling with the humidity. Maybe 12 years of living in Phoenix made it easy, I don’t know. But it was damn easy. The lush, LUSH, landscaping; green GREEN everywhere.
Key West had a tough act to follw (Miami) and it was a slower pace, but we came, we had a Cheeseburger in Paradise, and we felt the tantalizing fringes of the tropical Carribean.
On to Merrit Island and Kennedy Space Center.
Wow, what a sight. Space Shuttle Discovery Mission STS-124 to the International Space Station launched at 5:02pm on May 31st and we were there to see it. After the shuttle Discovery Commander received the go ahead for launch sequence, his final transmission to Johnson Mission Control was, “Get ready for the greatest show on Earth”.
It was.