We’ve finally made it to White Rabbit Acres organic farm in Vero Beach for our extended workamping stay after spending too much time waiting for the space shuttle to lift off.

We did have fun – and lots of margaritas – with our new friends in Port Canaveral. But our longer than expected stay just proves that time flies like, well … it seems to fly better than the Space Shuttle Atlantis right now anyway.

We didn’t even have time to catch everyone up on our stay in St. Augustine. René wrote about our visit to the Fountain of Youth, but the oldest city in the U.S offers much more history than that small artesian well which now rests some twelve feet below a room of dioramas depicting Ponce de León with his newfound Seminole friends.

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I’m not just talking about the first Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum, nor the umpteenth Thomas Kinkade Gallery. For starters, the Castillo de San Marcos is much more prominent and majestic. Walking its grounds, I couldn’t help but think of all the bloody battles that took place on the same spot so long ago.

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When I was a little kid, my Mom would listen to her favorite oldies station, humming along to 1950s hits while she did housework. No doubt that many of those hits were written by Johnny Mercer.

My Dad says Mercer was the greatest songwriter of all time, penning countless songs for Broadway shows and movies. Mercer was also the co-founder of Capitol Records. He is buried in the Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, so this week while we were in town, we went to pay our respects to the musical legend.

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It was nineteen seventy something or other when I remember driving right onto the West Point campus and climbing on the rocks while my father enjoyed mother’s famous Swiss Miss and bourbon “Cappucino” from a Thermos while waiting for the Black Knights to sink Navy, or beat Colgate. (Real men fight wars not cavities!) We would walk the parade grounds, run freely around all the statues, or check out the huge links of the Great Chain used to keep the British Navy from sailing up the Hudson.

Dad’s alumni ring probably helped us gain backstage campus access back then, but he’d probably need a lot more than that now to go anywhere other than on the guided bus tour. If he were alive, that is. But he’s not, so I had just had to return to West Point and check on another memory from my Right Coast childhood. But thanks to security initiatives put in place since 9/11, the public is no longer given free range among the cadets and pleebs.

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