Naples would be my first choice. We stay there every winter and the weather is always good. Some of the hotels are very reasonable. Best Western, only minutes from 5th Avenue, shops and beaches is cheap. The room we had overlooked a pretty garden with streams running through, nice heated pool and hot-tub. Lounge area in room with TV and computer (free broadband) other TV in bedroom and a kitchenette with fridge and microwave. Free breakfast! Naples is close to everything,Everglades, 2 hours from Miami. Love Miami too but the Hotels are awful unless you pay a lot of money, better in Fort lauderdale and visit. Everyone should spend at least one day in South beach

Thanks, have booked the Staybridge Suites through hotwire, great rate at $52.
Looking forward to the trip....will probably be back with more questions in the coming weeks!

Hello,

I'm new to this forum - I hope you don't mind me part-hijacking your thread, but the trip I have (semi-)planned is very similar to yours.

My itinerary looks something like this:

Day 1 - Fly to Tampa
Day 2 - Get married, Big Cat Rescue sanctuary.
Days 3,4 - lazing around at a nice hotel
Day 5 - drive through Everglades, fly-boat ride at the Everglades Safari centre, on to Miami
Day 6 - Kennedy Space Centre. (If I can tie this to a shuttle/rocket launch, so much the better!)
Day 7 - Miami
Day 8 - Drive to the Keys (destination undecided)
Days 9,10 - lazing around in the Keys
Day 11 - Fly home

I've posted here rather than start my own thread because much of the advice given to you is useful to me, but I also have a few other questions to ask the kind people on the forum. My partner is disabled, and can walk (with crutches) only for short distances, beyond that she needs a wheelchair or scooter. Is there any part of this plan that is impossible, or difficult, with scooter hire involved? Also, for a 40ish couple who like the quiet life, where's a good spot on the Keys?

Hope you enjoy your trip, Lesley, and that you can come back with high praise for the area to convince me to go.

Why would you go to Miami, go back to Kennedy Space Center ( 4 hr drive away) then back to Miami the next day? Wouldn't it make more sense to go across to Kennedy from Tampa (2hr drive) then on down to Miami the next day..

That might make more sense ... I'm not used to travelling over areas quite that vast!

I agree about Kennedy Space centre, it's really on the way if you drove from Tampa across to the east coast then down to Miami. When do you go AChambers?

I'm not really sure what the driving distance are. We're doing
Tampa (arrival)
St Petersburg Downtown - 2nts
Melbourne (shuttle launch on 12th November) - 3nts
Fort Lauderdale (have been to Miami already) - 2nts
Naples - 1nt
St Pete's beach. -3nts
Then flying Tampa to New York for 2 nights.

I'm already thinking there's lots of driving in between, but each journey I do between places will be one way. I'm sort of regretting not making it to St Augustine in with our plans. If it is dull one day when we're at Melbourne (but not the launch day), I'm considering driving up to St Augustine. I expect it might take about 2 hour max (any thoughts?), so if there's nothing else to do then I don't mind that. I don't think I could bring myself to do that when it's a nice day if I could be on the beach etc though.

Does anyone have any ideas on places we should stop along the way? I'm thinking some of the other beaches - Boca, Sarasota, go to Clearwater from St Pete's etc. I'd quite like to go to some sort of animal park/zoo but I have a reptile phobia so I don't want to see snakes or crocodiles etc. Any ideas? It might just be a reptile type of place though, so maybe there won't be anything.

While you are in Tampa go to Busch Gardens..http://www.buschgardens.com/bgt2/
Have a look at RandMcNally.com for driving directions and distances.
While on the road pull off when you see a Cracker Barrel restaurant- good food and a nice atmosphere. Great breakfasts- and best of all you have to walk through their 'Old Country Store' to get to the restaurant so you can shop while waiting for a table, or sit on the porch and rock.
You can see all of St Augustine in a day... downtown, old town and the Castillo San Marcos. The beaches there are not great. Most of the beaches on the Atlantic coast look pretty much the same, long flat beach with lots of hotels/condos.

Lesley, if you're into big cats, check out Big Cat Rescue in Tampa. (Not enough posts to use a link...)

I'm waiting on a property to sell, which should clear in the next month - once I know how much money I have to play with I can make firmer plans, but I'm hoping to be there in February. I don't think we can get it set up any earlier.

Long distance driving isn't a problem as long as we can hire a comfy car - my fiance actually likes driving around for hours. That said, it still makes sense to rearrange the plans so that we aren't covering the same ground twice. I'm still looking into which hotels, restaurants etc. we should aim to visit.

If you want a quiet part of the Keys try Key Largo- but if you want lively, then Key West is it, it is extremely flat, so easy to get around, and the town is very compact . They rent golf carts to drive around town in, and there is also a nice tour on the Conch Train, or the Old town Trolly, about $20 each, narrated tours of the town, you see downtown, the Hemingway House, the Southernmost point in the US. Do watch great sunsets from Mallory Square. There's usually a party going on by sunset with music and street entertainers.
Duval street is where most of the bars are located, you can do a pub crawl from Hog's Breath Saloon, to Sloppy Joe's to Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville... and more.

AChambers - just had a look and I think that scares me a bit. I love watching the lions at MGM in Vegas, but I don't know about all those other unusual cats. I guess I'm a bit of a scaredy cat I did feel a bit sorry for the poor wee Serval that is cross bred as a pet then the get a bit snappy and people dump them. Why do it in the first place - poor we things being house cats then having to try to live in the wild.

Looks like a good place though, thanks for the suggestion - it's a bit different too!

Here's the link in case anyone wants a look.
http://www.bigcatrescue.org/index.htm