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| Wasted away again |
My first thought was to indeed go back to Cocoa Beach in the same style as this trip but after reading one of the email offers sent to me recently because I'm a Universal Passholder, I thought I might spend a couple nights at Cabana Bay since they were offering a suite at just $119/night. Then the bomb dropped last week and luckily I hadn't booked it yet so I was back to downgrading my little vaca...now with no time restrictions though.
I discussed this all with Ric during the call where I told him of my firing and he was cool with a one-nighter at Cabana Bay but when he found out how much a Universal Pass was (~$350) that was outta the question. He suggested a beach stay and I told him I was considering that too. I checked out te hotel I'd stayed at last time there and it was available for a decent enough price so I booked it.
We debated who would drive and I knew I'd feel more comfortable in my car. He talks about his car like it's still considered a luxury car, but a 2000 Lexus, luxury-then or not, is now just an old car. And like old cars it looks dated, a little dilapidated and has an old car smell. The leather seats are squishy from decades of use, the suspension is bouncy and rolly like older, bigger cars are and the A/C works poorly. But don't tell Ric this. He thinks it's flashy and turns heads as he cruises down the road. Well, he also thinks his white sports coat from the Miami Vice era is still cool and his canvas Tommy Hilfiger duffel bag is hip. Um, come to think of it, during this trip he actually asked someone where the "happenin'" place is in Cocoa. Meh, I guess I'm stuck in a time warp for my own things in many ways too so who am I to judge.
I won the debate and, since my car sips gas and his decidedly doesn't, we went in mine. Problem is, I had to fill air in the left front tire again before we went anywhere since it was squishy again. Unfortunately, though it inflated okay before the trip, this problem would bite us in the ass the next day for our return. By the time we rolled into the Cocoa Beach area, the low tire pressure light, my persistent nemesis, was beaming its amber hate at me again.
We pulled up to where I thought the hotel was but instead of the Comfort Inn I'd remembered it as and the website confirmed, it had Quality Inn signage. They're both Choice Hotels but I was confused and thought I might have booked at a different location? Ric went into the lobby and confirmed it was the place I'd booked. Once we were both at the front desk we could see the signage behind the desk was in transition and the staff sympathized with my confusion saying that they actually just changed over to Quality Inn as of that day. What a coincidence.
Last time I was here I stayed in a ground-level motel-style room, but the hotel has several buildings and there's also a hotel tower toward the rear of the property (closer to the beach) which featured passthru suite rooms. The entrance was from a west-facing balcony into the living room area with a pull-out sleeper sofa and connected to through to a two queen bed bedroom with a private balcony facing east on the other side of the building, overlooking the beach and the ocean (except for the condo tower to the immediate east which was directly on the beach). An oceanview suite with balcony for just $117 including tax. Not bad.
The only detraction to the room was its old musty foot odor which pervaded it. It wasn't that bad once you got used to it. It was like home with its own variety of funky carpet smell. And it turns out, "funky" is just a feature that comes with Cocoa Beach.
Unlike the looks-of-it in the old illustration above, Cocoa Beach is no longer the happenin' place for the hoi polloi to vacation to as it may have been, especially during the height of the so-called Space Age. Even the Spring Break crowd tend to venture further south to more current-trendy locales such as Ft. Lauderdale and South Beach. But the Space Coast is still a player, just not so high-end. But if SpaceX launches become more frequent, and, especially if passenger flights become a reality out of nearby Canaveral...the area might transition into a new playspot for the kinda folk that could afford such leisure space travel. Shit, get the stodgy ol' Florida Legislature to loosen up a bit, put up some big name casinos and, well, it could be the southeast version of Vegas!
Until then though, what we got during the lull of the post-Spring Break, pre-Height of Summer time like now is the colorful daytrippers like us meeting the even more colorful locals.
After dropping our shit up in the room, Ric and I headed a block or two away to a patio bar and grill I remembered from my previous trip. Captain J.'s has a dark full-service restaurant downstairs with a small patio seated section, but upstairs they have a large patio with tiki bar looking out over the beach and ocean. Ric started off with a blended Pina Colada which was pricey and, he said, tasted like some of the Colada mix had gone bad. Ew. My bottled Bud (no draft available at all, which is weird) was fine, but on a warm beach day in the sun, it could have been much colder to my taste. Ric ordered, of course, wings which were pretty good. I had their Captain J.'s Fish Burger which was a big piece of fried grouper on a bun. Pretty darned good, I gotta admit. I think I had this last time I'd been here, actually.
At the bar near us, we struck up a conversation with some middle-aged folk. Turns out, being at a bar on your birthday is an immediate conversation starter. The woman seemed normal at first, though she poured her Miller Lite into a styrofoam cup with ice, peeled the label off each bottle as she drank, and constantly puffed on a vaper. But she seemed a little too friendly. The older guy next to her though, was batshit fuckin' crazy. He talked about how he flew his fighter jet through the eye of a hurricane and as he was topping out going back through the storm, his wings were flapping madly enough to make him worry that the four missiles attached beneath them might snap off and blow up a part of New York City. Then he shares with us that Absolute Zero is the temperature at 351 degrees Kelvin (positive not negative) that electricity is the "strongest." (Silly me, I thought is was zero degrees Kelvin and he's thinking about superconductivity.) He also nonchalantly let us know that now that his good friend Stephen Hawking has died, he was now the smartest man in America. (Ok, so if he was indeed such a friend of Hawking, why would he think Hawking lived in the US?) But then shit got REALLY weird. He likes me, for some reason, so he buddies up to me comes over and puts his arm around my neck and shows me some photos he's got on his flip phone. I guess he's so smart he doesn't need a smartphone. As I strained to see his tiny one-megapixel images I could only make out fuzzy flesh-colored lumps. He describes how he took pictures of his bitches and flips through pic after pic of bare titties and their "landing strips" as he cackles violently. Oh, and BTW, I only saw this guy have one drink. More than a bit freaked out, I catch Ric's eye and signal we needed to leave. Thankfully he didn't give me too hard of a time. But as we were getting ready to go, I could see that the lady seemed disappointed. Was he her pimp? Was he supposed to get us horned-up, rarin' to go with his mucho-cringy photos on his 2004 phone? Were those pictures of HER!?
The heat and my hangover from the night before when I'd killed an 18-pack of PBR was getting to me, and, because I still have residual night shift sleep pattern syndrome, I begged Ric to allow me to lay down for an hour or so in order to re-charge. He agreed and took the downtime as an opportunity for him to go down to the tiny hotel bar at the Quality Inn. I was able to recharge in about half an hour by just resting, not napping, took the elevator down and joined him there.
Here he was chatting it up with the only other patrons in the bar. A local lady who was very drunk already and a family of four from Minnesota who were staying at their snowbird condo next door. The all greeted me loudly yelling out my name, like I was Norm walking to his bar seat in "Cheers." Clearly Ric had talked about me. They wished me Happy Birthday but were there only another fifteen minutes or so since they were going to dinner. Ric swished back two pints of local lager on tap and a couple of bottles of Coors Light. He was quite drunk by the time I finished my two bottles of Bud.
We'd gotten good reviews of the Downtown area of Cocoa Beach about 3 miles south of us. One bartender assured us we could walk it by beach if we wanted to but 3 miles in the hot sun in my current physical shape was not going to cut it. Ric called an Uber.
It was getting close to dinner time when we got to Coconuts on the Beach but I was still full from the fish sandwich earlier. We got a pitcher of Bud Light and sat at the bar facing the water as this was yet another beachfront bar. Ric got Fish & Chips and I tasted a bit of fish; it was awesome. There our bartender was a cute 26-year-old that Ric barely acknowledged 'cause he was pretending to be straight today. Hmm, right. I tried to point out other hot muscled beefy barboys but Ric gave a big Meh. His issue is his misgivings about Max, his odd little "boyfriend." He's starting to feel like when he and Gary used to have fights, that Max was too fem for him and he was "over us gay people." Oh brother. It's that Ric again.
The sun set and the view of the ocean faded to black in the time we were there and when needed to move on (the patio was closing down and we would have had to move indoors...yuk), it was full-on night and other places in the area seemed to have already closed. We remarked how different it was from our bar-hopping last year for my birthday down on I-Drive, but, like I said before Cocoa wasn't the hotspot it used to be. Shit shuts down by 10 pm on weeknights.
Joe had called earlier while Ric was eating his Fish & Chips and I invited him and his boyfriend to come down, party and stay in our suite for the night. It took them less than a couple of hours to make it from Inverness, almost the full way on the other side of the state to the west. We Ubered back to the hotel and there they were having just arrived.
We'd been hearing about one bar nearby that had it all, except the oceanview. Now that it was dark, that was fine with us so we walked down to a bar right near Captain J.'s called the Sandbar Sports Grill. This place had cool decor like a grown-up version of Spongebob Squarepants, chill vibe with a faux Alanis Morriesette covering her tunes on stage, cold pitchers of beer with free nachos and we later got a big ass pizza that was the bomb. Here I hit my memory threshold as I went into full on drunk mode but my guess is we all loved it.
Once back at the hotel, I presume sometime after midnight, we sat on the private balcony and we passed the pipe around. The neighbors in the room directly below caught wind of our herbal fragrance and moaned that they wished they had some. Joe obligingly passed the pipe down to them from the edge of the balcony and before long we were down on their balcony partying together. They had booze and shared swigs of peach and peppermint schnapps along with Joe's pipe. Ah, it was like I was 17 again. But these guys were also a bit weird and one guy, oddly similar in character to the pervy genius from earlier, especially creeped me out. I went back up, Keir as well as he too was over it (he was particularly upset that Joe offered up HIS weed to strangers without asking) but soon the creepy guy was up in our room with Ric and Joe and, though I was half asleep, I think they were doing coke. Man, I am literally too old for this scene.
The extended party finally broke up around 4 or so and I woke up around 9:30. I decided I didn't want to leave today without even once setting foot on the beach so I walked barefoot across the street to the beach and the long stretch to the water (must have been low-tide) and let the waves crash over my feet and lower legs. I would have thought the water would have been much colder since we had a cold winter this year but it wasn't THAT cold. Had it been the middle of the day like when we left Captain J.'s yesterday, I might even have tolerated a swim. Though admittedly, I'd be slow getting used to the chilly temps. The water was like an early June beach day in New England, too cold for born-and-bred Floridians but bearable for us Yankees. After a few minutes, I walked back and the others were slowly coming to life. On the way through the parking lot I checked out my car and, sure enough, the squishy tire was now fully flat. I couldn't even chance driving it to get air nearby as I'd be driving on the rim.
For the next few hours Keir was super helpful and tried to re-inflate my tire with my Spark's flat tire pump and re-sealant kit but it didn't work. He jacked up the car, removed the tire and we drove in his car to a local Firestone. My size tire wasn't in their huge tire inventory so they had to order it taking an hour to arrive. The mounted it right away once in to the rim and we made it out of there about 1 pm just after the cloudy skies opened up and dropped a cloudburst storm on us. He put the new tire on my car in the rain and though I tried to give him money, he just wished me birthday wishes again and refused it. What a sweetie! Funny, I always took Kier for a prissy type like Jerry Cote.
Ric meanwhile, was probably fuming. He had to be into work for 3:00 and this left us about an hour and a half to make that time. I hate to drive fast but I zoomed back to Orlando as fast as a smidgen over the limit would allow and we got back to my apartment right around 3. So he'd be about half an hour late or so. He didn't seem that irritated. I think he knew this was just bad luck plus I think he'd called his boss and he was cool with it, yet it would mean a half hour less pay, I guess.
All in all, it was definitely an interesting birthday trip.