May 14

After a comfortable night's rest, we grabbed some breakfast at the hotel. The buffet was very good and afterwards, we went for a little stroll on the beach. As usual, Michele had to "stick a toe" in the water to test it out.

We checked out and were on the road by 9:30am. Today’s “Florida Coast to Coast” run would make for a short day. Only about 150 miles, we expected to be in Melbourne by 1:00pm.

Heading through Kissimee we happend upon today's "picture of the day". Where else but in Florida would you come across.....Orange World?

The route was straight forward if you looked at a map. If you have a Goldwing navigation system with XM traffic, the route becomes a bit more interesting. Based on our charted route, the Navi let us know that we could expect up to a 45 minute delay. No problem, right? Recalculating……and so the Navi went as we made our way eastward. After being “rerouted” a few times and winding up back on the same road with no real advantage seen, we got rebellious when we saw a sign for Melbourne that said we had 45 miles to go yet the Navi was telling me we had nearly 70 miles until we reached our destination. Hmmm...

A quick zoom out of the map showed that the Navi was taking us in a less than direct route. Uh oh. It obviously thought there was a major traffic issue on a stretch of road. Given the nature of “traffic” we’ve seen in Florida, we disregarded the urgings of the Navi and continued straight along 192 towards Melbourne. Well, we got to the “traffic” jam that the Navi was trying to get us to avoid. The Navi showed us this menacing red route:

While we saw a road that looked like this:

Obviously the Wing Navi has gone native Floridian on us. Look at the horrible traffic. You can see another car!!!

We arrived in Melbourne at around 1:30pm. In the short 150 miles of riding, we found out that the love bugs of Florida have begun their annual death mating ritual. I’ve never had the bike this splattered with bug guts before. Just imagine the feeding you all would get without a windshield or full face helmet. (It is difficult to see but look at the top edge of the wind shield. That is representative of the entire front end of the bike)

So perhaps the Wing hadn’t gone Floridian native on us. Maybe the bike was just hungry. Hmmmmm.

We spent the rest of the day lounging on the beach and playing in the surf. Not a bad way to spend the afternoon.

Tomorrow we head to the Kennedy Space Center to look at some rockets.