Third day in Miami

By our third day, we’d fallen into a very pleasant pattern. I get up 8-ish, put on a bathing suit, bring the banana I took from yesterday’s breakfast buffet downstairs to add to the cup of coffee that the very nice hostesses at the restaurant give me as a down payment on my breakfast, consume said banana and coffee, and then go for a swim.

Normally I’d be renting a bike and going for a long ride somewhere, but here I’ve decided that taking advantage of the opportunity that I have to do some distance swimming in the ocean each morning is not something to be missed. So I do a nice long swim, today something slightly less than half a mile. After that, I reserve my chair and umbrella, then go back up to the room to rouse Ronnie, after which we have breakfast and head to the beach.

The beach is not at all a Miami kind of scene. It’s very sedate, more like a Caribbean or Bermuda kind of resort than South Beach. Some couples and some families, usually with little kids (since school has started, it’s mostly a preschool set). It’s relatively small, with soft sand and gentle waves. It’s very pleasant.

We stay there until around 2-something, at which point we get out of the sun and have lunch in an alcove on the shady side of the hotel. Things vary after that. Tonight we went back to Miami Beach and saw Rush at the theater on Lincoln Rd. No, not the unbearable band Rush, the movie. The movie was fun and afterwards we paused for a bit to watch the Global Citizen concert, which one of my kids was attending, on my phone. I should just note here that Stevie Wonder is a god.

Then we went in search of dinner, which unfortunately both required a wait and sucked, but what can you do. It’s still great to be out somewhere busy at 11- many of the stores, even chain stores, were still open and the mix of families with kids of all ages, bunches of teenagers, and couples like us strolling the street was pleasing.

Even though it was after 11 on a Saturday night, the clubby area of South Beach was dead, so we abandoned plans to just be part of that scene and went back to the hotel.

Let me say a bit about Miami and the trip. First of all, although I like the international/Spanish flavor of the place, it would be nice if I could walk in someplace and talk to someone for whom English is their first language. It’s been kind of rare on this trip, and I wouldn’t care as long as people understood me, but a lot of them don’t. It’s frustrating.

Second, do not, under any circumstance, buy a Ford Taurus. We rented one of these puppies, and though the color of ours was a fetching cross between green and smoky gray, it’s one of the worst cars I can remember driving in recent memory. In particular, the right rear blind spot is immense to the point of being dangerous. It made changing lanes an exercise in terror on a regular basis. It’s also inconvenient to turn the wipers on. You need to twist the left-side wand almost halfway around to get a fast wipe, far from ideal in a rain when someone going the in the other direction floods your windshield. And the turn signal lever is inexplicable. After 4 days I still can’t get it to do what I want, and I’m really good at figuring out how to work things. The button to open the trunk is on the passenger side of the console, the gas gauge doesn’t register that you’ve put gas in the car for 10 or 15 minutes after you’ve done so, and the automatic windows make it nearly impossible to open the driver’s side window a small amount. And this particular one stunk of cigar smoke every time we got in.

Aside from those little things, and the looming disaster area that is Miami airport, it’s great.