Chances are, if someone asks you what you think of Florida, you will answer Miami, beaches and, maybe, NASA. Certainly that was our impression before this trip. A pleasant diversion from road-tripping through prairies, mountains and deserts, but not something that we didn't already have at home.
How wrong we were, pleasantly.
Leaving the Everglades behind us we pointed the car north and west and headed towards the strangely Russian sounding St Petersburg. On roughly the same latitude as Melbourne, Florida, St Petersburg is, to this point, the surprise of the trip. Something completely Un-Floridian, and entirely pleasant. Nestled on the western side of the Tampa Bay, and home to the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team, St Petersburg is alluring and a little bit of San Francisco. The people were perhaps the friendliest we've encountered to date and the (gulf) beaches beautifully cool and clean.
Around the bay, in Ybor City, we met with Cuban immigrants in the process of hand-rolling cigars and heard the history of the area, but that was only after TripAdvisor sent us to a very dodgy neighbourhood...
Heading east for the final time in the holiday we arrive many hours later in Titusville, via Orlando and the Mickey Mouse shaped power poles, and the Kennedy Space Centre. A night spent parked semi-legally in the car park of the wildlife refuge and plagued by a million Mosquitos and one overly curious raccoon challenged our patience, but it was worth it the next morning to visit the Kennedy Space Centre.
Nestled on the east coast, at the, allegedly, best place in the world for space launches, the Kennedy Space Centre pays tribute to more than 50 years of space endeavours by the Americans and, grudgingly, the Soviets (now Russian) and other nations - although not, conspicuously, the Chinese.
I had high expectations from boyhood dreaming of space for this visit, and all those expectations were met. From the, obviously, older exhibits to the newer Saturn V/Apollo exhibition (standing under an actual Saturn V rocket) to the brand new Atlantis exhibition (standing next to the actual Atlantis shuttle and the experiencing what it's like to go through a launch, well, sort of but not really), it is well worth the extra three hours you weren't planning on spending there.
To the furthest west in Florida, amid towns with names that are unpronounceable - Apple-cola, Pepsi-cola - lies some of the most beautiful land we have crossed so far. Expecting more swamps,we are instead presented with quintessential American farmland, that might be in Iowa or Missouri. Acres of rolling grassland, dotted with black-and-white cows and ringed with lush-green forests, white beaches with redbrick mansions and the winding country roads through small towns bearing charming taverns and the hope that Americans can actually brew good beer.
Florida was absolutely unsurprising in so man ways, and exactly what we expected, but as we enter Louisiana on the road to New Orleans we're looking back at the final 24 hours in the Sunshine State and thinking that there is so much more to it than the sunshine, skin and beaches of the south coasts...
I'm also aware that we're, dramatically, short-changing Alabama and Mississippi. This is not intentional, merely the unhappy roll of our road-trip schedule dice. In the two hours that we were in both states I was awed by the beauty of the Alabaman highway vista and the Mississippi grandeur, but sadly they will have to wait until a later visit,
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