Miami Vice

  Miami, Florida, United States
Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Wednesday 5 November - Miami

Our flight from LAX to Miami was late, so by the time I picked up the car it was dark & I got lost. The Americans are generous with their road names - they give each one several names - the "I-835" or the "Dolphin Expressway" becomes the "I-395" before becoming the "MacArthur Expressway" then the "A1A". Very difficult to follow.

Ocean Drive

We finally made it to the Clay Hotel in Miami Beach which is on Washington Ave, 2 streets back from the prestigious, Art Deco, Ocean Drive.
The Clay Hotel was originally a monastery before becoming Al Capone's Miami gamboling headquarters in the '30s. The rooms are small, just big enough to swing a rosary, but it's located on Espanola Avenue the historic Spanish district (ironically it's where the Italian restaurants are).

Espanola Way

The hotel has featured in several Miami Vice episodes & the Sly Stallone film "The Specialist". We had a favorite italian restaurant where we engaged in one of the local pastimes, people watching. This was a good area to get accustomed to Spanish - not many used English as their first language.
We have found tipping difficult in America, trying to work out 15% when you've have had a bottle of red wine - but they make it easy for you in Miami, they add 18% on for you !!!

Cameo

Miami is a city of ostentatious wealth, especially the cars - there are many flash cars - Black Ferraris with gold wheels, convertible Rolls-Royces, dozens of Bentley Continentals, black & chrome stretched Hummers, X-Types Jags with black windows & yellow Lamborghinis (yellow seems to be the drug dealer's choice of colour). I don't know why they need sports cars - the speed limit is 15-25 mph everywhere. Opposite our road was the Cameo Club, advertising "Fabulously Nasty" shows - I didn't go because they didn't give "senior discounts".

Surfers

The beaches were great, stretching for miles (most of the sand on the main beach was imported from the Bahamas). The local craze was kite surfing, skimming along being pulled along by an airfoil kite. They get up to incredable speeds & leap many feet in the air when turning round.

Everglades

Airboating

The Everglades (or "River of Grass") at the southern tip of Florida is not a swamp, as I thought, but a very wide, shallow, slow moving river. It flows at about 1000m per day down to the sea from Lake Okeechobee (wasn't he the hairy one in Star Wars?).

Flashy Airboat

It was well worth a visit, we started with an Airboat trip, skimming over the water prairies & drifting through the waterways looking for wildlife. We saw loads of water birds, turtles & many alligators close up.

Smiling Gator

We then went to the Shark Valley National Park where you can walk right into the Everglades (thanks to that nice Exxon Oil Company that laid a road right into the Everglades to do some oil exploration).
The gators like to climb up onto the edge of the road to sun themselves, they seemed bored with visitors & don't move out of the way. You are supposed to keep 5m away from them, which is difficult on a narrow 4m road.

The nearby Miccosukee Indian Village was a bit of a disappointment, I was expecting native Seminole "chickee huts" but instead there were rows of identical bungalows with shiny Ford trucks outside.

Fort Lauderdale
We moved north to Fort Lauderdale 'cos a tropical storm threatened Miami. Fort Lauderdale
is about 30 miles north of Miami Beach & a major holiday resort. I don't think I have seen quite so many holiday hotels, they stretch for miles & miles along the white beaches.

We obviously didn't go far enough, as the wind & rain caught up with us. The original plan was to veg-out on the beach for a few days but it hissed down with rain & blew a gale - not part of the plan at all.
We decided to cut our losses & head for the Kennedy Space Center about 3 hours up the coast.