After having enjoyed the sweet life on Tybee Island, we drove down the eastern Florida coast with three extra days on our hands, hoping maybe to spend a day somewhere on the beach and maybe even getting some surfing lessons.

The Lonely Planet told us that the most dependable surf in all of Florida was on Cocoa Beach, so we headed there. We arrived pretty late in the evening (what’s new about that?) and found several surf shops still open, but for lessons we had to call the next morning.

The next morning we called just after they opened, but they told us that there would be no lessons today because there were no waves; no waves, no surfing – obviously! Instead we headed for Ron Jon’s Surf Shop – which is huge by all standards – where we bought a body board for Felix and a skim board and a body beard for Sabine and me. We played all day in the nonexistent waves (they were really baby waves, but big enough for us to play in). We also figured out that it takes exactly five seconds to fall off a skimboard…

Late in the afternoon we drove south to West Palm Beach, where we enjoyed a nice pizza and a beer in a brewpub, just managing to get out before they closed! That night it was WalMart again, which unfortunately was situated between the two runways of the Palm Beach Airport. Luckily they had a curfew from midnight to 7 am

The next day we headed to downtown to stroll around, before we went to Palm Beach to look at the fancy houses and swim a bit. Some of the houses here were more castles than they were houses and some even had their own private beach and a beach house (probably because it was too far to cross the road, the front yard and the tennis court to get back to the house for a cold drink 🙂 )

The third day we went to Biscayne National (Underwater) Park – which we were supposed to have done after we had been in Key West!