Shuttle Launch

Saturday, I drove south on A1A from St Augustine, hoping to see the shuttle launch. Last year, I walked out on the beach near my office when that one went up but being 65-70 miles away, I barely saw the contrail after someone with binoculars identified it for me.

Not wanting to be right under the thing, I stopped about 30 miles north of the launch site at Bethune Beach instead of going all the way to Cape Canaveral. Actually, I didn't have much choice because the road ended just south of there in a state park. Anyway, I arrived around 2:30 with the launch scheduled for 5:00 PM so I drove around a bit then had fajitas at Mi Mexico, a Mexican Restaurant a block off the beach.

I had my Pentax DSLR camera ready with 300mm lens ready to go but when the shuttle launched, I couldn't make the thing focus and had to manually manipulate it. I managed to squeeze off a couple of marginal pictures as the fireball rose in the sky. It's tiime to be looking for a new zoom lens. Right on schedule, I heard a cheer rise and saw the rocket flame and smoke plume but not the actual shuttle.

By 5:05 PM, all the whoops and whistles had subsided and I found myself in a crowd of people headed back to our cars. I then added seeing a shuttle launch to my "been there-done that" list of things to do and made my way back to St Aug.

When there's a will, there's a way

On Memorial Day, I was out buying a few things that normally could be dropped down in Boudreau's saddle bags. I stopped off at Home Depot for a couple of things I couldn't find anywhere else and while there decided I just couldn't live without a quarter sheet of fiberboard for a project.

With a little roughneck engineering and help of 3 bungee cords, I strapped that stuff on Boudreau and headed home. Folks in the parking lot and on the highway may have gawked but I got my stuff home.

I did discover, no matter how hard you try, it's really hard to look cool hauling plywood on your cycle.

Oh well, who needs a pickup truck?

St Augustine, Florida

This is my third time here in St Augustine so I don't even bother plugging in my GPS unit. I have not noticed any changes since my stay on Anastasia Island last summer. After just four days here, I'm still not sure if I'll be here another week or several months.

St Augustine is a pretty laid back community with a lot of retired or partially retired individuals, many of which hail from the upper east coast. During spring break, the beaches are wrapped up with college and high schoolers and the summer with vacationing families. It's about an hour from the airport in Jacksonville and about an hour north of Daytona Beach.

St Augustine claims to be the oldest continually occupied European established community in the US and oldest port in the continental United States. The historic district is a great place to wander around and spend time looking at tourists who may have an appearance more dorkier than yourself.

Obligatory sights are downtown of course, the Fountain of Youth as well as Ripley's Believe It Or Not. They've dismantled the old Bridge of Lions and at present, constructed a by-pass bridge. So far, I've passed on the alligator farm across from the lighthouse but plan to walk the endless beach. I've settled in at the Holiday Inn and expect little if any excitement, That probably isn't a bad thing.