Driving Down the Silver Lining

We started out around 9:30 a.m. (much better than 5 a.m.) and headed out to Mims.

We visited the White Sands Buddhist Center. Beautiful Buddha statues that were 30 feet tall. It told the life of Buddha and had places to burn incense. It was a beautiful place with a pond in the middle surrounded by meditation benches.

It was cloudy but no rain and I figured once we got past Cocoa Beach, it wouldn't be too bad. We headed south to Christmas to visit Swampy at Jungle Adventures. Swampy is the actual outside building. It's 200 feet long and is the biggest alligator statue in Florida.. We snapped a pic and noticed that they spray-painted all the ground shells lime green. Why they would do that?

JJ picked our first impromptu spot on the trip. We stopped at Fort Christmas. It was a normal park with a baseball field and tennis courts but with a cool wood fort. It is a replica but the quality of it is spot-on. You were able to walk through it and it explained the importance of the buildings. After exploring, we went our way back to US1.

The Liberty Museum was closed because it was Monday. Other than the bell in Pennsylvania, two replicas were made: one in Texas and one in Florida. Will try to visit it near the end of the trip.

Driving South, we've found a Warbird Museum. I was super excited but didn't want us to shell up the 40 bucks for the impromptu attraction. Maybe later. I really like old planes so I won't forget to go when I have more time and money. There were some cool planes outside so we snapped pics and checked them out.

We drove through Melbourne and Cocoa Beach. We found a store called The Dinosaur Store. We had to pull over and check it out. That was an awesome store. It had a extensive collection of quality stones, bones and fossils. After that, we alternated between A1A and US1. The A1A here is not like ours at home. It wasn't very long and it would run back to US1 constantly.  We did drive by Patrick Air Force Base. We saw a helicopter launch and soldiers having their own lives on the other side of the fence.

 Our next stop was the Blowing Winds Preserve in Hobe Sound but it closed right before we got there. I thought we could just go to the next entrance on the beach and walk back.  Turns out that's where the rich people live so it was a few minutes of driving before we found a beach. It was Coral Cove Park. Even though the park didn't have wind rock formations, it had nice rock placings in the sand. They were turtle nests around too. They were taped off to protect them. The storms were offshore and made for some great pictures.

Drove by the Juniper Lighthouse getting to US 1. We couldn't find a cheap hotel in Jupiter /  North Palm Beach area so we safely car camped in the back of a Walmart parking lot. Two truckers were resting there so we figured it would be no problem. The only "problem" was when people drove near us, I woke up in defense mode. The entrance of the lot was connected to the back lot so it was normal for people to cut through. At least it didn't rain much to at all. I packed stuff for car camping in case we had to: Window covers, door covers and a battery fan that turned out to be a godsend. Car camping by a Walmart has its perks. For dinner, all I had to do is go in and get some groceries. I picked up a can of chop suey because it was getting late, and we needed something fast. I parked by the curb so I could just set up my cooking stoves on the curb. Insta-table! It worked out pretty well. To travel cheaply or as cheap as possible, you gotta be okay with making some sacrifices. It's not all bad though. You start to realize what you really "need".