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.