After years of visiting family for vacation, we decided to do something fun for a change. Actually, we were going to go to the beach two years ago then Kallie got sick and we couldn’t go on vacation at all. Last year we went to Texas and this year I said “I’m going to the beach!”. Heath and Katy wanted to get their yearly rocket fix in so I though Cocoa Beach would be nice as it’s close to Kennedy Space Center. I found a cute little resort from the early ’50s that was rental housing for NASA employees right after Kennedy Space Center (well, it was called something else then) opened. Werner von Braun, the founder of Space Camp, even stayed there once. The main attractions, though, were that it was cheap and on the beach!
Our vacation officially started on Sunday Heath didn’t want to wake up early, drive all day and get there late and still have to find a grocery store, so we spent the night about halfway through and got to Cocoa Beach around 1 or so.
Heath’s sister Lee, her husband, Chip, and two of the grandkids — Ethan and Evan — met us up there. We wanted to have all the Wisconsin family come (Lee and Chip and their three daughters, two sons in law and seven grandkids) but it was too hard to get that all together with everyone having to get off work.
So we rolled into Florida late Saturday afternoon and stopped at the visitors center for brochures and fresh-squeezed orange juice. Georgia could take a lesson!


Sunday morning we got up, ate breakfast, hit the road again and got to Cocoa Beach.

This is the front of our resort.





There are all these little brown rabbits on the property that are not at all afraid of humans. This isn’t a very good shot but the rabbit took a grape out of my fingers. He was munching down on some kind of flowering weed so he calmly finished that then took two grapes out of my hand. The manager said they like grapes and we happened to have some.
This rabbit was younger and a little shyer but even he didn’t hop off too fast.

So we settled in, went to the grocery store then hit the beach!



We asked the property manager for a good restaurant for kids that night and they had this cute sign.