The way the flights worked out, we didn't leave until 7:20 at night. And then our flight was delayed. Adelyn usually goes to be bed between 6:30 and 7. But she did great! Smiled at the flight crew. And then snuggled in for some sleep. She woke up when we landed and stayed awake through the car ordeal...
We had reserved a car. When we got to the car rental counter, the guy told us that the manager was down there where the cars were and that if we acted mad, they would comp the gas and give us half off. I thought he was trying to give us an inside scoop on how to get the car cheaper, so I joked with him about it... then he said they only had vans left. Not just any vans, 15-passenger vans. Oh, ok. Got it. We are mad about that. So we went down to get the car. And we waited. And waited. Not sure where the vans were coming from, but we ended up waiting for over one and a half hours for it. Towards the end Adelyn started to get cranky, and so was I. But we got our sweet ride and left the airport.
In the great state of Florida, there are Steak n' Shakes. This was our one chance to go there. So we were "those" parents and brought Adelyn there at 2 am. She had napped in the van, so she was awake and alert.
Finally, we made it to the hotel. But with our bellies full of burger, fries and shakes, we were pretty happy. We were the last to check in at the hotel. Thankfully we had prepaid, so they didn't give our room away. But, they didn't have any cribs left. Adelyn woke up when we were unloading the van. We made a bed for her out of extra pillows and a blanket. She thought it was a lot of fun to crawl out of her bed. Finally, she went to sleep.
After what seemed like a short night, we were up and on our way. We went to a deli that is owned by a guy that Ben knows for lunch. SO GOOD! We had a nice chat with him and then we rushed out the door to make it to the coast.
We started hitting some traffic. We both agreed that we did not want to watch the shuttle out of our ride's windows because we couldn't find or get to a place. So, we picked a rough area of where we wanted to be and headed that way. We ended up about 20 miles away from the launch, near Cocoa Beach. We had a great view and there were very few people. But being 20 miles away, we didn't see nearly the detail as we would have liked. One cool thing about being that far away was that we saw the launch and just as it was disappearing from view, we heard it. It was neat to have that much delay. Crazy!
We had dinner plans with some people we met at this year's IM cruise. Dinner was set for 6:15 just about 10 miles north of where we were. We had about an hour to get there. No problem, right? Wrong! Traffic was terrible. It was literally stopped. People were getting out of their cars to visit with other people. People were turning their cars off. RV's were pulling onto the shoulders to wait it out... We got to the restaurant around 7:15. Our friends had an even shorter distance to go and we beat them. But finally we connected and had a nice (??) Thai dinner. The question marks is because the service was terrible. It was the waitress's first night. And because of the launch it was a bit crazy. Luckily for us, we had great company. And Adelyn did great. Towards the end she started to get fussy, but by then it was after 9. Oh, and she did great in the traffic too - slept the entire time.
Even with the stop for dinner, there was still some traffic issues. We took a couple of side roads to avoid some of it. Ben let me take a nap. I don't even know what time we got back to the hotel. I think it was after 11. Adelyn was so sound asleep in her car seat, that we decided just to leave her there. But in our room, of course.
The next morning we were up at 5:30 to make our flight back home. It was a whirlwind of a trip, but we had so much fun!
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