AND THEN TO KOKOMO

I was devastated to find out that Kokomo isn't a real place. My disappointment was so strong that I imagine there was a ripple back along the space-time continuum and my 12-year old self suddenly felt a wave of despair for no discernible reason. No doubt she would have attributed it to the ongoing disappointment that they changed the actor who played Jennifer in Back to the Future II, then shaken it off and gone out to climb a tree or something.

Despite this distressing discovery, I was still quite excited to find myself in the general vicinity of where The Beach Boys *pretended* Kokomo was. My return flight from Jamaica had me pass through Miami and - always a sucker for a stopover - I jumped off the plane with the song lyrics running through my head and hired a car for a four night road trip up the coast of Florida.

Aruba, Jamaica, ooh I wanna take ya

to Bermuda, Bahama, come on pretty mamma.

Key Largo, Montego...oooh I wanna take you down to Kokomo.

South Beach, Miami. Oooooh no. No no no. I don't know what I had expected, but arriving here and going out in the evening turned out to be a bad idea. It felt debaucherous, and not in a good way. The beautiful art deco buildings were invisible beneath a thrum of clubs blaring doof-doof music out onto the street (probably audible from the Bahamas), pavement tables crammed with half-naked twenty-somethings gulping down cocktails from glasses the size of soccer-balls, and crowds of drunken American youngsters pushing past each other and talking at top volume about nothing of any consequence to humanity. One overheard quote from a guy on a mobile phone, doing that "pimp roll" walk favoured by ass-hat teenagers all over the world: "Yo nigger, where you at? No YOU the punk-ass chump. Well you just better get yo black ass down here, punk-ass mother-f*cker."

Lovely, no?

I felt like I'd walked into Sodom or Gomorrah and didn't want to get too close to anyone lest their sin-germs rub off on me. I'd never felt so old, prudish and out of place. I ran away as early as I could. After having recovered from the depravity of the beachside at night, I wandered along there in the morning and it was absolutely delightful.

Still, I was super-keen to get going to what would be the focus of my adventure on this short trip - Cape Canaveral and a trip to NASA's Kennedy Space Center. It was BRILLIANT. Great, great, great. An American friend in London (incidentally, not a werewolf) had told me that tourism on the Space Coast in Florida was suffering since the end of the space shuttle programme in 2011. So much so, that it was now branded the "Ghost Coast" by locals. Whilst I was not the only visitor at the Kennedy Space Center, the crowds were pretty sparse and the infrastructure (queue barriers, size of the carpark etc) was clearly a relic of a more popular era. Still, it suited me as I didn't have to line up to see anything.

Home Sweet Home

I absolutely loved it. Although I didn't arrive the very second the gates opened in the morning, I was there until the bitter end and practically had to be shouldered out the door as they were closing in the evening. I saw real rockets, walked across the same red bridge thingy that the Apollo 11 astronauts crossed to get into the ship that would take them to the moon, stood on a real launchpad where a real rocket was launched from...words just can't explain how cool it was (something you may have noticed, as I'm not doing too well with the words here). I geeked out even harder than I did when I visited Bletchley Park. Love love loved this trip.

Although visiting NASA was clearly the highlight, I did have some other fun and/or memorable experiences during this trip:

• ate some Waffle House hash browns (thanks, Bloodhound Gang)
• spent a night at Cocoa Beach, which I later found out was the home of Kelly Slater
• went to a Wal-Mart determined to snap a picture of someone with hideous dress sense to share with The Internet; failed, but did discover and buy a packet of pretzel-flavoured M&Ms
• experienced a gorgeous sunset as I was driving over the bridge at Cape Canaveral, just as 'Walking on the Moon' started playing on the radio
• discovered that driving a left-hand drive car isn't as difficult as I had expected, although I did spend a lot of time groping at my armrest when I was trying to change gears

And finally, I was reminded once again by all the wonderful and kind people I met in hotels, restaurants, basically everywhere I went, that Americans are so, SO much nicer than Londoners.

JAMAICA, MON

So my work (yes, WORK) took me to Kingston, Jamaica for five days the week before last. Not bad, eh?

I had organised a meeting in conjunction with a local organisation, and we had delegates flying in from all across the globe to attend. The meeting was to take place on Wednesday and Thursday, however the limited flight connections available meant that most of us had arrived by Monday evening. That left the whole of Tuesday (and at the other end, half of Friday) free to devote to touristing. Hurrah!

First stop on the tourist trail was the Bob Marley Museum. It's housed within Marley's Kingston home, part of which is a fully equipped recording studio that is still used by his sons when they're in town. Accompanied by a guide, we were paraded through each of the rooms in turn - most of which were empty spaces with walls covered with either albums, gold records, artwork, or newspaper cuttings. There were  two rooms ostensibly left the way they would have been when Marley lived there - the kitchen and the bedroom.

I don't know why, but the whole tour made me feel uncomfortable. It seemed really creepy to be poking around Bob Marley's house, peering at his favourite jacket (now framed and hanging on the wall), standing in the room in which he was shot (not fatally, obviously), and poking our faces into his bedroom (whilst being kept behind a barrier rope).

Maybe my discomfort was because he died so recently - within my lifetime, anyway - so it didn't seem 'historical' enough to justify traipsing around his place like you would a 19th century Australian homestead. His blender was still set up on the kitchen bench, which is an image not sufficiently divorced from my everyday life experience to make poking around feel educational rather than voyeuristic.

Anyway, I wasn't a huge fan of the museum, but in a separate building out the back they'd set up a gallery of photographs and placed some of his guitars on display. That section was cool.

After the Bob Marley museum we went to Jamaica's National Art Gallery for a personalised tour of a retrospective of a significant Jamaican artist. So significant I can't remember his name. (Just googled him - it's Barrington Watson) I didn't like most of his work, but apparently it's very well-regarded and important. Meh.

I was much more excited about our next destination, which was a beautiful colonial property in the hills a short drive from downtown Kingston. Forget the slums where Marley grew up, this was how the other half lived. Fan-cy. The organisation we'd come to meet had arranged a great big party to welcome us to Jamaica. People, wine, food, musicians...it was delightful.

The "Giddy House"

The next two days were taken up with meetings, but after finishing a little earlier than expected on Thursday, we decided to travel out of Kingston and visit Port Royal. It was apparently once known as the most wicked place in all of Christendom, and used to be crammed full of pirates and scoundrels. In an act that was surely ascribed to divine retribution, a major earthquake in 1692 caused more than half the town to sink beneath the Caribbean Sea. Two hundred years later, another earthquake struck, this time leaving a number of buildings at Fort Charles half-swallowed by the earth. The most famous of these is Giddy House, a former artillery store so called because locals say it makes you dizzy to walk along the slanted floors.

We ended the day lounging by the sea with drinks and a not-so-atmospheric backing track of disco music blasting from a nearby cocktail bar.

The rock that looks like a...

I had made plans to stay one day longer than everyone else, and was delighted to be invited by a Jamaican family to join them on a road trip to Ocho Rios on the northern coast of Jamaica. We spent most of the day at the marvellous Dunn's River Falls just outside Ocho Rios. The waterfall cascades straight onto a beach, and the effect was stunning. We avoided the hand-holding, guided climbs up the falls and mapped our own route. I have no idea how long it took us to climb to the top; we were constantly stopping to luxuriate in the calm pools of water on the way up, or draping ourselves onto a rock with the water gushing around us. It was the most fun I've had in ages.

I left Jamaica the next day with a thumping hangover, fond memories, and a mild sense of trepidation about the next stage of my journey. I was returning to London via Miami, so planned to stop off for a few nights and had arranged to collect a hire car from the airport. Which meant I was about to have my first experience driving on the WRONG side of the road. Could I do it? There was nobody else with me to take over if I got scared, so I didn't have much choice. Eeek!!