Cocoa Village

From the rustic to the civilized, the Astral Nomads walk many paths. Since this little cold snap has temporarily driven us from the forests, we decided to hunker down in Cocoa, Florida. Cocoa is about 9 miles inland from its more famous neighbor Cocoa Beach. Cocoa Beach is famous for at least two things: it was the home of Major Nelson on the 'I Dream of Jeannie' television show and it's the current home of the world-famous Ron Jon Surf Shop. I don't really know if the Ron Jon Surf Shop is world-famous but they claim they are and who am I to dispute it? One of the weird things about this surf shop is that it's open 24 hours a day. Who needs to do an emergency baggies buy at 3.30am? Anyway, back to Cocoa. Cocoa has a nice little artsy-crafty shopping district called Cocoa Village, so we took a spin down US1 to check it out. Yes, for home viewers, it's the same US1 that runs through NJ. The southern terminus of US1 is in Key West. File that for future Jeopardy! credit. Anyway, here's some shots of Cocoa Village:

The City of Cocoa seems pretty proud of its water tower.

Like I said, very artsy-crafty.

That's a lot of aqua paint.

There's a really nice waterfront park

and Civic Center adjacent to Cocoa Village.

The body of water is called the Indian River.

I was able to try out my acting chops on the

Civic Center outdoor stage. Surprisingly, there

were no requests for encores, even from Wendy.

As a native Northerner, it's always weird to see

Holiday decorations in Florida. Palm trees and

Tannenbaums are just orthogonal to me.

We had lunch at Ryan's Pizza, which was an Irish Pub/

Italian Pizzeria combo. The food was really good. This

is Wendy's spinach stuffed pizza slice. I ate about half

of it myself in addition to my nice Stromboli.

Here's an arty-crafty tin rooster.

Some old guy was tooling around in this antique

surf mobile. Had a couple of boards on top that

looked like they hadn't seen water since before I was born.

Again with the cows.

This satisfies our camp content requirement.

This is the Cocoa Village playhouse.

There was a place selling vinyl LPs. The 50 cent

bargain bin had some classics: Foghat, ELP, Pet Clark,

and here's an original Al Stewart 'Year of the Cat'.

Sheesh, I feel like Grampa Simpson.

-The usual suspects