Dec 10th. Day 1. Destin FL.

600 Miles driven today.

So today is actually the start to our road trip as its Day 1 and we are leaving from our sunny West Coast location of Naples Florida to a unknown location/weather, this morning it was cloudy but still in the low 70’s so we were dressed in shorts and hit the road at around 9:15am we did have to stop off at Fort Myers airport to drop off the car (again).
We got to the the Dollar Car Rental drop off point some 30 minutes after we left and dropped of the car and changed it our for a Kia Sportage a very nice brand new 1,500 mile SUV which would hopefully get us all the way to Las Vegas in 19 days time. So now we were on out way, we decided today that we would push as hard as we could sticking to the freeways and get as close as we could to our original second day destination of Pensacola.  It was very unlikely that we would get that far but if we could get close that meant that we could get to Houston on the 12th Dec in time to meet our friends Brandon & James and spend a couple of days with them.
The first thing we noticed was the temps dropping fast, I mean really fast, in no time at all we were at low 50’s and we had only gone a couple of hours. The rest of the journey was quite boring as we kept to the Interstates mainly i75 and i10. The GPS had us getting into Destin at 5:30pm as we started at 9:30 that was going to be 8 hours in the driving seat but worth the push, as it turned out when we got there it actually meant 5:30pm local time and in Destin that was 1 hour behind our start time so we ended up driving 9 hours and we were knackered.  Once we had committed to going all the way to Destin, Lorna booked a hotel online, so we could just rock up and get into the room and get out for a well deserved drink.
We got into the hotel and OMG it was cold I mean 42 cold so we ran to the room and was straight out again for a drink in the hotels bar, OMG 2 drinks each cost $40 so we got an Uber to McGuires which is a Irish bar we had been to before where our friend Colm works but not today as he was actually on his way home to Portugal as we turned up. We was told to ask for Stu, a guy behind the bar who we met and mentioned Colm and we settled in for a few drinks and a good meal, the whole evening cost the same as the 2 drinks at the hotel. By now we were both really tired and we got a Uber back to the hotel ready for a good nights sleep, tomorrow we are aiming for New Orleans. But first thing in the morning we are shopping for some warm clothes. Night night.