First day (plus) in Miami

After our marathon voyage here, it was nice to take it easy. We ate at a funky little place in a strip mall, right near the Winn-Dixie (I keep wanting to say Piggly Wiggly, but I don't think they have those here). Then back to the room and to bed early.

The next morning was bright and hot and I went for a short walk to get a cup of coffee. Key Biscayne is very close to Miami, but it's kind of out in the ocean and isolated too. There's about a half mile-long set of strip malls on one side of the street, mixed in with a couple of parks. The other side of the street is mostly apartment buildings with a couple of hotels mixed in. That's it. The rest of the island is a state park with beaches and tennis and whatever kinds of park stuff.

My walk keeps me in the shade for the most part. The hotel driveway is very long- it's about twice as far to the road as it is to the nearest strip mall once I'm out there. I look for someplace open and find a small bakery, where I get coffee. I sit in the shade and drink the coffee. The hotel has coffeemakers in the room but they're noisy and Ronnie was still asleep, and they don't make very good coffee, truth be told.

After returning to the hotel (this is the kind of nice place where they have a table full of water bottles and towels and sunscreen outside for the joggers) I went up to the room and the we had breakfast.

What else could we do at that point but go to the beach? It was hot and sunny and really quite pleasant for a while, in a way that would be awful at home but which is much more bearable when there's a large body of water in front of you. We had an umbrella and a flag to raise if we wanted drinks and I had a Grey Goose Frozen Lemonade, one of those things I would never do if I wasn't on vacation. It was good, though the problem with frozen drinks is that you can't nurse them, at least not when its 90 degrees out. I'm guessing that the drink is served frozen for a reason and did not want to tempt fate by letting it thaw.

Eventually, despite occasional dips in whatever body of water we're facing (they all kind of look alike, don't they?), we got hot, so we went back inside. After that, we had lunch and tried to get some coffee at Starbucks, but were foiled by a power surge that had knocked out the espresso machines. So we went back to the hotel and I swam a bit and did a short workout. When we figured the thunderstorms and the horrendous rush hour traffic had cleared, we headed into South Beach for dinner.

We didn't really want to do the whole South Beach scene, but Ronnie had been to a restaurant on Lincoln Road (which is a pedestrian mall for a few blocks) that she thought I'd like, so we went there. I like Lincoln Rd. It's a promenade in the best sense of the word. People just walking around, happy to be there- families, people with dogs, young couples, all strolling, eating, whatever. One of the things I really like about Miami is that it's almost like being in a foreign country. English is clearly not the first language for a significant portion of the populace, and it's occasionally hard to make yourself understood. But as both a cause and effect of this, it's an international destination for Spanish-speakers. Most seem to be from South America. It gives a real multicultural flavor and I'm sure that's why it's such a cultural hotbed.

Dinner was very tasty and afterward we promenaded back and forth, the maitre d's on the street trying to tempt you into their restaurants with "How are you this evening?" to which I'd reply, "Full." It was all in all a very nice vacation day.