7 March 2023, Buenos Aires, Argentina to Orlando, US, via Miami –

In the last 7 days we’ve stayed in 7 different places, taken 4 flights (including a 9 hour overnight), lived out of minimarts, and washed our clothes in bathroom basins. We’ve lost track of the time of day, eating and sleeping to fit with our travel schedule. We’ve spent hours waiting in airport lounges and for shuttle buses. So it was a huge relief to finally arrive in Orlando, our home for the next 7 days.

Our last day in Argentina was spent sleeping in, having a late breakfast, resorting and repacking, catching up on the blog and emails, and going for a short walk. The “highlights” of the neighbourhood are a pretty church (we heard the bells at 9am), and a monument to Juan and Eva Peron, in a dusty park.

The hotel was very accommodating, letting us stay in the room until 6pm at no extra charge (although seeing we didnt check in until nearly 11pm the previous night, we figured we got the hours we’d paid for). We departed in plenty of time to check in, go through security and passport control, and be ready to board our 10pm flight to Miami.

We touched down at 4.30am, and reversed the whole process, which took less than an hour – a far cry from the hours we’ve spent queuing up at LAX on previous trips. Next task was picking up the rental car, followed by a short drive in the breaking daylight to our nearby accommodation – chosen purely for its proximity to the airport. We planned on doing nothing more than sleeping for the rest of the day.

Despite having a kitchen, clearly one was not intended to actually cook a meal, or wash up. No bowls, no drinking tumblers, one pot, no kitchen knives, no tea towels; the most spartan kitchen we’ve ever seen. We ate our cereal from the coffee mugs, and managed to throw together some pasta for dinner.

We did get a good night’s sleep, and are now back on a “normal” schedule. We faced a four hour drive to Orlando, but decided we should attempt to see something of Miami before we left it. We negotiated the traffic through the less affluent suburbs, into Miami Beach. We crossed a causeway via the bridge which inspired the percussion introduction to the Bee Gees “Jive Talkin”, and crawled our way to the A1A, which is the north-south road closest to the coast.

It was wall to wall high rise hotel and apartment complexes, lined either side of a narrow road with umpteen traffic lights, and no view of the ocean. Think Queensland’s Gold Coast on steroids, and you get the idea. We couldn’t work out how they could possibly fill so many rooms. We spotted the Trump Towers amongst the multitude of buildings.

Eventually we tired of the traffic, and headed for the Interstate, busy with trucks and the usual traffic chaos of any freeway in a large city. We took it well north of Fort Lauderdale, where things began to calm down. At Boynton Beach we detoured off, to give Ian a well deserved break from the driving, and to have a quick lunch. We returned to the A1A, which was much more pleasant here. We were now well and truly in “homes of the rich and famous” territory – enormous gated estates guarded by stone lions, yacht-filled marinas, golf courses, and of course the ubiquitous palm trees. In places we could actually see the Atlantic properly.

We ended up in West Palm Beach; skirting a roundabout, we figured we were right outside Mar-A-Lago, Trump’s Florida home. All we could see was a high rose pink fence, and a bit of the terra cotta roof line. We guessed we were not going to get an invite for afternoon tea, so we headed back to the Interstate for the rest of the drive to Orlando. The rampant development of south Florida gave way to green swathes of land, and for the next couple of hours the drive was more relaxing. We turned off I-95 north of Cocoa Beach, and headed inland to Orlando.

We are now settled into a proper house – two bedrooms, two bathrooms, full kitchen, and best of all, a washer and dryer! Never have clean fluffy clothes felt so good (well OK maybe after 2 weeks trekking in Nepal …) We’ve been living in shoebox sized rooms for a while, so the space to spread out is very welcome.

Tomorrow begins a very different phase of the trip, as we head to Cape Canaveral for an attempt to view a rocket launch – the first of three scheduled for this week – and start exploring the Space Coast.