Day 35: New Smyrna Beach to Port St John

March 9, 2015

I was listening to Bill Bryson on my iPod during the night. He reads his book "I'm a Stranger Here Myself", which is a series of articles about life in America, written after Bryson (born in Iowa) returned after 20 years in England. In one little segment he describes his wife looking over his shoulder as he writes, and she mumurs "Bitch, bitch, bitch". Bryson denies that all his thoughts are negative, and mentions the Bill of Rights, the Freedom of Information Act, and free refills as some of the more wonderful things here.

With this in mind, I asked Dodie whether she thought my referring to our current motel and the others like it here as "flea bags" yesterday, was a bit harsh. She said maybe, and maybe we should call them Old Florida motels (very old).

We left our Old Florida motel right at the crack of dawn. It's kind of easy, since after the switch to daylight savings time, dawn is only cracking at 7:30. However, this time had the desired effect: all the bikeers were still asleep. In fact, the first ones did not wake up and hit the road until well after 9. Once they got going, they were still annoying, but we were now far enough south that their ranks were considerably thinned.

Our route, the one laid out by Adventure Cycling, just called for a straight run down US 1. US 1 in this region has no redeeming value at all. (Bitch, bitch, bitch). I took a couple of photos just to honestly show what is (not) here. So we started to speculate on whether we were missing anything. For example, New Smyrna is supposed to be a nice town (according to the Chamber of Commerce), so where was it?

We did pass one intersection with a sign indicating downtown to the left. As we shot through, I had a peek, but not time for a photo. What I saw was one block of low commercial buildings on each side. Not sure what was in them, obviously.

Still this got us (Dodie) thinking. She looked at her AAA map, which gives some perspective, vs the tunnel view of the ACA map. "Hey, she said, I wonder if we can get on to this island that contains the Space Center, then later we can get off". "Dunno", I replied, "My ACA map/shows the road you are talking about as a dubious looking dotted line".

So we tried it, hanging a left onto a smooth but no shoulder road, which for the record was SR 3. A half km down the road we came to a welcome kiosk, stocked with a series of pamphlets. Opening the first pamphlet our day went from blah to THIS IS THE GREATEST! As soon as the upload happens, you can look at it too. Here's the thing - the Kennedy Space Center occupies half of Merritt Island, which has on its southern end the famous Cape Canaveral. NASA bought the whole island in 1962, but did not need it all. So the remainder became a National Wildlife Refuge. It was a lucky side effect of the space program. The island has 500 species of wildlife, and supports more endangered species than any other refuge in the national system. It includes marshes, hardwood hammocks, pine flatwoods, scrub, and coastal dunes. Part of this is the Canaveral National Seashore, which has kms of raw open ocean beach. We missed that, because we did not clue in and hang a left earlier.

The tip of the pen shows how ACA depicted SR 3 as a dubious dotted line.

This map shows the Refuge and the Space end of the island

Pretty exciting to enter the Space Center precinct

We followed the almost deserted road, south toward the space centre. It is not possible to enter the center from this direction, though. You come to a security gate, and have to turn west. When you do that, you pass the Refuge visitor centre, which is a lovely building with excellent displays and a long and beautiful boardwalk. We did not have time to go see all, or even much of the refuge, but it sure made our day. We switched from saying how boring this area is to saying that this is one of the highlights of the trip.

We had planned to make our way to the space center tomorrow, and we will still do that. We cycled to a motel (The Travel Inn $59) outside Port St John, and tomorrow will backtrack just 3 km to SR 405, which will take us back on to the island and to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. In Geneva we made a special point of visiting CERN, where they delve into the sub-atomic world. So it makes sense to go to Kennedy, where they delve into the out of this world.

The Travel Inn, by the way, is one of those Old Florida places. But it is clean and will do the trick. We came here despite there being a well recommended campground, the Manatee Hammock, just up the road. We figured it would be a long day and better to end where there are lights. Also, we can stash our gear here and cycle to Kennedy without the packs. This should be loads of fun!

Ah, p.s. on manatees. Merritt Island has a large manatee population, and a sanctuary area where no motor boats are permitted. There is a canal which joins the intercoastal waterway to Mosquito Lagoon, where manatees are often seen, and indeed we saw one. It was just swimming by, so my photo shows just water. We could see him under the water, but the main way to spot one swimming is by swirls in the water that are created by the tail.

This gopher tortoise was eating breakfast when we came upon him.

A look at the canal in the direction of the Intracoastal

A distant view of the space complex from where we had to turn aside

The well appointed refuge visitor centre

This guidebook covers a region that we had previously thought had nothing of interest!

You have to look hard to see this armadillos head

This is a whole dragon fly, but some wings seem to be invisible

Today's ride: 79 km (49 miles)
Total: 1,872 km (1,163 miles)

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