Days 22 and 23 - Nursing Our Wounds and Racing to Daytona

The day after 'Tomato-gate', the three of us were paralyzed by pain, punished by our bad choices. Conversations were conducted with grimaces as we gritted our teeth through homoerotic aloe vera application. In a move of what can only be described as pure bravery, Jannick stridently strode out into the sun-kissed car park and drove to the pharmacy to collect us our holy grail of remedies - aloe vera cool gel. He arrived back to our lightless cave and brandished the bottle with defiant celebration above rapturous applause. Or maybe he just sort of walked in.

Jan a la rouge

That bottle served our raw hides well, but there was not much else we were going to make of the day - gloriously sunny though it may have been. Sob. We huddled up in the room until lunch, when Joe went out to grab us lunch (another Whataburger triumph); Jan and I stuck around the hotel attending to menial tasks like doing our laundry and dousing our bodies' flames with cold water. Joe's recovery seemed to be on a speedier plane than that of Jannick and myself. In fact, I was perhaps the most profoundly hit by starry heat because of my lack of a life-saving base tan. The boys had both cultivated some brown on holidays before YankeeLashLadsBoozeCruise2K13. The rest of the afternoon passed by fairly uneventfully; we watched some football and mooched around glued to our screens.

Yummo

At dinner time, we deemed it safe to crawl out from our dank den and go in search of more food (is this all we do?); we were heading to a barbecue place for some real American prime rib, if we could get it please. This place was closed at 8.08 on a Tuesday evening - crushing news - so we went to Joe's back up barbecue place a bit further down the road. The establishment was called Mojo, which its food had by the American gallon. We ordered the 'Whole Hawg' for three, and shared a meat platter that would have threatened to sate even Henry VIII's most voracious appetite. Blackened chicken, pulled pork, beef brisket, ribs and sausage. All of the nom.

Mashed potato, french fries, and some token greens

Packed to the gunnels with what felt like half of Old MacDonald's farm, we returned home for another aloe soak and to get some rest after a hectic day. We watched a fairly good heist thriller called Empire State and called it a night.

The next day we were hunting new beach booty - the iconic Daytona. The drive was one of the prettiest of the entire trip; ocean views and streaming sunshine were in bountiful supply, and our eyes lapped them up. Our skin was a little less enthusiastic though, and we did our best to shelter our vulnerable limbs from the sun-soaked sky.

Beach residences on the road to Daytona

We passed through a couple of very nice towns, including Flagler Beach and St. Augustine. The former was used as a pit stop and a cheeky camera opp, while the second struck us a town that broke the trend of the average Floridian settlement, seemingly offering the richest cultural footprint of any city we had seen in a while. It turns out that St. Augustine does have a few feathers in its historical cap, tracing its story back about five-hundred years when it was explored by Spaniards. Since then it was settled by the British, and then the Spanish again. The city was also a major site of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, where clashes of Ku Klux Klan members and protesters yielded many arrests and wide media coverage. Martin Luther King, Jr. himself visited St. Augustine at the request of the local civil rights leader Robert Hayling. In a poignant coincidence, we were driving through this town on the 50th anniversary of Dr. King's March on Washington, a date that I had initially anticipated after seeing the plaque at the Lincoln Memorial a couple of weeks ago. Back in the mid-1960s, public revulsion of the Klan's violence in St. Augustine helped push through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Flagler Beach

More houses should be like this

We arrived in Daytona in time for lunch, so we dropped our stuff off at the hotel - Hilton Oceanfront Resort, don't mind if we do - and braved the 30 degree temperatures for some lunch. Joe, our new restaurant-locator-extraordinnaire was in the mood for some Tex-Mex and had found a Cuban restaurant in the vicinity. A quick drive, a sit, and a glass of water later and we were ordering our food: sizzling fajitas for me and Jan, and a Cuban steak with fried plantains for Joe. It was absolutley scrumptious to say the least, and quite a spectacle at the same time!

#hylyf

After lunch we cruised back to the hotel and rocked up poolside. Fearing a trip to the beach might bring further onslaught to the epidermis, we settled for a lounger and a chlorine dip. We waited for the water to fall under the shade of the Hilton tower before getting in and doing a few laps. Bit of exercise in'nit? After a couple of hours by the pool, we shot up back to the room for showers, aloe, and arrangements for the night. It was our last evening with Joe, as he was leaving us on a plane to Texas the following morning, so we thought it best that he chose a restaurant (again). His eagle eyes and efficient processors discovered Boondock's, a seaside seafood restaurant not far away.

We each enjoyed some legendary crab legs, as Jan and I shared a Captain's platter (shrimp, clams, crabs, and white fish) and Joe ordered about a trillion for himself. He had been keen to get crabs for a while at this point. We all enjoyed a beer and a natter as the sky grew dark; even the extremely attentive staff (let us eat already) were eager for chats with us. Who cares if they thought we were One Direction?

The night ended nicely; after what felt like an hour watching Joe scrape the last remnants of pink flesh from his mountain of armoured legs, we tossed our discarded food into the water below and watched the fish pounce on it like a pack of scaly wolves. Exhilarating stuff for throwing away shrimp shells and a lemon rind.

We made one final stop before bed, and picked up a T-shirt each at a discount store near the hotel. The stock was impressive: lots of hats, vests and T-shirts provided enough threads to kit out an army of spring-breakers, some of whom are evidently so vacant that they require instructions printed on their attire lest they lose sight of the task at hand.

Been there, didn't do that, nearly got the T-shirt...