We left Jacksonville feeling that we’d escaped an ordeal. Our spirits brightened at the thought of leaving that sleazy drug house, of forgetting the farce at St. Augustine, of finding beaches stocked with fossils.
Vague goals swam through our heads as we traveled down I-95. We wanted to see at least one popular beach and inspect Stuart, because Coastal Living told us it’s charming. How long these stops would take, or what exactly we’d do at each, didn’t matter to us.
For no specific reason, we chose Cocoa Beach over Daytona, Palm Beach, Boca Raton, and Fort Lauderdale. The main thing we hoped to accomplish with this stop was to put some content in the “Popular Florida Beaches” folder in our brains, to get a little more perspective about what’s out there in the world.
Cocoa Beach was exactly what we expected, mainly because our expectations were so amorphous as to account for anything we could have found.
Beachgoers were sparse, but then Mondays tend to thin the crowd. The water was warm–surprise!–and the sand was silky. The water was bluer than up north, but not as blue as some pictures boast for Cocoa. That’s post-processing for you.
We walked, splashed, breathed the ocean vapors, then zoomed down to Stuart. Apparently this town is a really great place to retire (that is, if you’re loaded). Pleasant neighborhood, interesting buildings and shops, pretty waterfront, cultured community activities. We weren’t retired, but we felt relaxed there.
The waterfront boardwalk was nearly deserted, except for a yoga class contorting beneath a theater pavilion. We strolled on the docks and basked in the sun, feeling the platforms rock with the waves, admiring Roosevelt Bridge under the clouds. Later, walking along the water, we spotted some crabs down on the exposed oyster reefs, and I shot a few nifty pictures of them.
Importantly, the ice cream from Hoffman’s Chocolates may have been the best I’ve had. It made up for not finding any chocolate at Cocoa Beach.
At the end of this fun-filled day, we traveled the rest of the way to Miami. If only we’d practiced our Spanish!
