Ron Jon’s Superstore

April 6  In keeping with the Retiredness (my own word) of the trip, we managed to eat breakfast and get on the road before 10am and joined the Southern migration on I-95.

When I was a boy riding cross-country with my parents, we counted down the miles to places like the Jack-rabbit Ranch and Rattlesnake Farm and a host of others that posted billboards all along the highway.  Ron Jon’s of Cocoa Beach is no slouch in that department.  Throughout South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, billboards counted down the miles proclaiming the T-shirt and Flip-Flop mecca to road weary travellers.  Of course we had to stop!

Inside the glass sided palace were thousands of shirts, flip-flops, surfboards, and a zillion other goodies we didn’t know we couldn’t live without.

Waitin’ for the chow.

Shopping burns a lot of calories so we walked around the block to the Sandbar Sports Grill for cold beer and huge burgers (this is a vacation after all), We waddled back to the car and headed South.

Jim had signed up for the SunPass on the Florida toll roads so we were able to breeze around Miami in pretty light traffic – of course, the fact that it was Saturday afternoon might have helped.

We arrived in Florida City )our jumping off point for the Keys) about dark and opted for a fine dinner of fat free frozen yogurt buried in mounds of M-n-Ms, nuts, fruit, fudge and other fat infused toppings to negate any caloric savings attributable to the yogurt.

Off to bed and dreams of sun-kissed beaches and blue waters as we travel the overseas highway tomorrow.