Day 8...and I thought Kansas was flat

Day 8…”and I thought Kansas was flat..." 

Today I woke up in Mississippi, drove through Alabama, and started the LONG trip down Florida to Key West.  To commemorate the start of what will be roughly 5 days in Florida I give you an old time classic…Going to FLA!

 

 

 

I was tempted to stop in Pensacola and go see the Naval Air Museum, but I could tell this was going to be a long day so I had to be content with an old Blue Angel at a road side rest area.

 

I suppose that when you follow the coast you have to expect to see water and bridges.  Well, I did and I must admit that to this boy raised in dry, dusty west Texas that I really enjoy it.   I don’t think I could live on the coast, but it is surely nice to look at. I particularly enjoyed watching pelicans do dive bomb attacks on a school of fish today…those bad boys evidently don’t miss too often and I love how they adjust their dives all the way to the point of impact.  Of course, if I were a fish I’d either swim deeper or learn to look up occasionally.

Here’s another news flash.  If Florida didn’t build tall bridges there would be NO vertical relief.  I lived in Florida for 6 months when I was a Lt. learning to fly the Phantom.  I guess I’d forgotten just how flat it is here.  It makes Lynn County, Texas, look like the foothills of the Rockies.

I drove through the panhandle and visited Hurlburt Field, a place where I went often for training while in the USAF.  It has really changed with the growth of Special Operations.  It was a hoot watching the V-22 Ospreys fly around the pattern instead of the CH-53 helos.  Technology has come a long way.  However at Hurlburt there is a place reserved for history you ought to see…   It is a park with old war birds used by air commandos and special operators since WW II.  It is a real slice of history.  There are also tributes to the Medal of Honor winners who either flew the birds or were on Air Commando missions.

 

It was probably a tactical error to drive down the gulf coast today.  I spent too many hours doing 45mph through one little town after another spread out about a mile apart along the coast.  You can only enjoy looking at so many places that want to sell sea shells by the seashore (and sun screen, and beach toys, and slushees, and more shells…..)   Tomorrow I’m going to have to go on the interstate to make some miles that I lost today.

Of course, I'd go a little faster if I didn't stop to read the roadside markers and to watch a turtle dig a burrow.   Yep, I spotted a turtle throwing sand out of a burrow on the side of the road and stopped to watch.  By the time I got the camera ready and tried to sneak up on it, it decided to escape into its newly dug cave.  If you look at the photo below you can just make out his shell.

Early in the afternoon the clouds started building in front of me and I experienced not one but TWO of Florida’s summer rain storms.  The first lasted about 45 minutes and I spent the time with two retired shrimp fishermen under the awning of an abandoned convenience store.  They sure filled me in on the history of the area (pirates used to drop anchor RIGHT HERE!) and the local politics, “the paper mill runs the town and everything around here…and it smells like someone farted all the time.”

The 2^nd storm caught me in the middle of nowhere and I got pretty wet before I could pull into a rural gas station and hide under its overhead cover.  Lightning was hitting all around and the thunder was awesome!  The wind blew so hard I put my rain gear on because the water blew sideways beneath the awning.  It lasted nearly an hour and stopped as abruptly as it started leaving the road steaming and the air crystal clear. 

 

I pulled into Tallahassee about 8PM, with the sun just gone down, a pretty tired scooterist.