Rebuttal

Getting to Cocoa Beach has often required pulling an all nighter. When I was a kid, we traveled in our land yacht, a Pontiac Safari station wagon. Some sailing purists might suggest that I am again traveling in another bloated boat with my Gemini catamaran. I remember on one of the trips as a kid making a game out of finding the cheapest gas price. The winner was 54 cents a gallon. Now the game is to find the most expensive. Winner so far is $3.85 a gallon. You do get gouged on the water.

I had a blast staying at the Polaris Motel as a kid. The beach was yards away. I would spend the days making sand castles (really just digging large holes in the sand) and body surfing in the ocean. Grampa bought me a styrofoam board on which I surfed the waves. I'd also stick it in the motel pool, get a running start from the deck and jump on it trying to surf it like a real surf board. I cracked a couple of the boards in half trying this stunt. It's a wonder I didn't crack my head open on the pool ledge.

I got so sunburnt on one of the trips that it was difficult to climb the stairs to our balcony motel room. I couldn't bend my knees, I was so sunburnt. You wonder why I have so many freckles. Of course, parents weren't nearly as careful with their kids in those days, as the "helicopter parents" these days. My sister and I would climb all over the station wagon while traveling down I-95. We never wore seat belts in our land yacht.

One of the highlights of those trips was a bus tour of the Kennedy Space Center. By myself at about age 8. I'm pretty sure that I saw the inside of the vehicle assembly building. And I have a definite memory of the dual roads and the huge tractor which carries the rockets to the launch pad, one tread on each road. And of course, there were the launches. I have a definite memory of what must have been one of the Voyager launches. And believe it or not, even though I was only about a year old when it happened, I used to have a sort of memory of the Apollo 11 launch. It was really just an impression of light and noise.

Even though I didn't like seafood as a kid, I always looked forward to going to the Fisherman's Wharf and feeding the catfish. It was an amazing sight. The fish would be so packed together competing for the scraps we would toss them. I think the restaurant sold bundles of old hush puppies and fryer scraps that we would toss to the fish.

Grampa insists that he wasn't trying to traumatize me by taking me to see Jaws. But what kind of parent takes their kid to such a movie while at the beach? I think the next day was our last of the trip, and I was afraid to go in the water. It was a windy day and the surf was kind of rough. Grampa assured me that the surf conditions were too rough for the sharks, and that it was fine to go in the water.

I won't even go into the bars that Grampa took me into to play pool at that age.


A Shuttle fuel tank going through the same bridges the boat and I went through to get into the Banana river.