Road Trip 2009: Day 11 of 17 (Daytona Beach\Cocoa Beach)

Daytona Beach to Cocoa Beach

Daytona Speedway

Memorial commemorating Dale Earnhardt who died in a crash at Daytona in 2001

Imaging what it must be like on race day. The track is 2.5 miles - huge!

Raceway tram tour

Daytona's famous 31 degree banked turns. Why 31 degrees? Because that's as steep as they could make it without the asphalt laying machines tipping over.

Running "3 wide" in an exhibit at the Daytona 500 Experience

Fresh seafood for lunch

Crashed

View from our hotel in Cocoa Beach

Monday June 1, 2009

We spent the night at a La Quinta in Daytona. On our road trip we never make any reservations, we just look for a mid-range hotel like Hampton Inn or La Quinta when we get where we want to be. We prefer a hotel with doors on the inside to motels. We can usually find one for $70-100.

In Daytona, we toured the Daytona Speedway. The weather was nice and it wasn't crowded at all. We've never been to an actual race, but it seems like it would be a lot of fun. It was neat to imagine what it must be like on race day. We drove by the Streamline Hotel, the birthplace of NASCAR, on the way to the raceway. It was neat learning about the early days of racing and how they used to race on the beach.

We ate lunch at an outdoor seafood restaurant beneath one of the causeways. We've eaten at a number of causeway restaurants on our road trips and they've always been good - don't know why.

After lunch we headed to Cocoa Beach. For most of our trip we stayed on US highway 1. I-95 runs down the coast also, but we liked going through all the towns on US 1. We were planning on spending the night in Cocoa and visiting the Kennedy Space Center the next day. A lot of tourist places let you come back the next day for free, so we stopped by the Space Center to see if they had that deal. They did, but we didn't get there until closing time. The Space Center is surrounded by a nature preserve and we saw a number of alligators in the canals.

We checked into a hotel and went for a swim and then a late night dinner at Pollo Loco. We've seen Pollo Loco's around, but never tried it. It was fairly crowded and we were overwhelmed trying to order from an unfamiliar menu and workers that spoke minimal English. The food was pretty good.