Day Three - 18th October 2016

Evening of Day Two – 17^th Oct.

We ventured out to find a place for Dinner and wandered down the strip. There’s restaurants & clubs for several blocks, with awnings over the pavements and tables & chairs outside (despite the breeze it’s still quite pleasant to sit outside). As you walk past you get the hard sell from the waiting staff to come & sit down. These are, mostly, young women in shorts & t-shirts (or slinky dresses), though there’s the occasional hot ‘Ricky Martin’ fella, and each place has music blaring out, predominantly a Cuban-American dance beat.

One thing we have noticed here is that Spanish is spoken almost as much as, if not more so, than English. Being bilingual here would be a necessity I think and it’s quite cool to hear several conversations going on in Spanish, with waiting staff at the hotels and restaurants seamlessly switching between the two.

Each place is pretty much similar, so we settled on a place called the Breakwater that didn’t seem to have very loud music, so enabled a good chance at conversation.

We may have gone just for dinner, but we ended up staying for a few hours, just sitting and watching the world go by on a pleasantly warm night, and what a fascinating slice of life it was. Our spot on the balcony outside was a perfect place to sit and people watch, and there was all manner of shapes & sizes & dress code passing by.  Despite being off season and a Monday night it seemed pretty busy, and this place must heave in summer.  There was a constant stream of people, (couples, families, groups of friends on a night out) as well as a continuous stream of vehicular traffic up & down the road. We had a cocktail or two each, and it was a very pleasant night. On the way back, we had to stop at the beachside clock showing the date for Deb’s official birthday photo.

Day Three. 18^th Oct

Today, we picked up our rental car. We have a tour of the everglades planned for later in the day, and we chose to pick up a car earlier in the day so that we could get used to driving around again ( “tight right , wide left”) and then head out to the tour, an hour or so north of Miami township. That was a very fortuitous decision. To pick up the car, we had to go up the length of Miami Beach Island to the Avis dealer ship. With an option of a taxi ride or an hour’s walk in sweltering sun & heat, we wisely chose the taxi. The ride took about 20-30 minutes, and took us past some stunning marina’s and Hotels on the way. The water level on the marina was quite high and overlapping the edges, and in several places on the road there was significant flooding from the drains. This is apparently a normal problem when there’s a king tide and although a bit disconcerting didn’t cause any severe traffic problems. Our taxi driver was a classic old fella, Spanish American , who talked the whole way up expertly on such topics as tourists , tourist drivers ( ‘tourists come here and don’t know how to drive, they cause so many accidents, what are they thinking?”, Florida drivers, Miami drivers (‘They got no idea how to drive , they’re so rude. Look as this guy, look at this guy, he just pushes in) , Miami pedestrians, presidents , politicians, the secret service (‘they come here and take everything over. They close everything down. They tell everyone what to do’).  

We arrived at the Avis counter without fuss, and picked up our car, a Ford Mustang convertible. Deb had been seduced by a special Avis deal, and in a moment of recklessness, decided to hire it instead of our usual sedate and sensible options.  The idea of driving down the Florida Keys with the top down had some appeal.  However reality soon caught up with us, as we found it enormous compared to the Mini, the bonnet is almost the full length of Mini, and it handles a bit like a tank.  We also discovered that it’s baking in 30 degree heat while you are sitting in city traffic J

We decided to drive back to the Hotel first as the roads are relatively straightforward, then head out to Miami downtown to look around a while. After dropping our gear at the hotel, there was 10 minutes spent trying to figure out how to put the top down (no manual with the car) and then we headed downtown. We thought we’d try & look at Little Havana first and then downtown Miami, but after heading into town, our GPS, despite having the latest maps, made a few odd calls (voice & image not matching the street signs we were seeing), and after 30 minutes we had to pull over and try & find where we were and how to get out of Miami!

Unfortunately the GPS decided on a go-slow and misinformation campaign, and another 30 minutes was spent trying to find a way out of Miami to our tour destination. Miami city is a rabbit warren of freeways ,interstates, on ramps and off ramps with a lot of construction and changes happening.  However we managed it and got on the road out to the Sawgrass Tour center where our Airboat ride would take place.

The tour center is about an hour (of normal driving) out of town and is a small place with a number of airboats and small wildlife center, containing several animals. We had a while to kill before our tour, so wandered around. The park is quite small, and the animals they have are quite varied and have been rescued from various situations, for example from private owners illegally owning exotic animals, or those who’ve been found in distress or injured. There’s a few big cats (like the Florida panther), snakes, and of course Alligators. 

The airboats are very cool. They’re flat bottomed boats powered by car engines (Chevy 509 engines I think the guy said), but being car engines aren’t really designed to operate in this way. They sound great though, and steering is done by a lever that pulled backwards & forwards turns two rudders behind the fan left or right. Very basic but effective.

As we still had some time in hand we went for a drive further along the US27 Highway so Deb had a chance to get used to driving the beast. It’s a long flat straight road. After an hour we’d barely turned a corner and the scenery hadn’t changed at all. We turned around and headed back, and arrived at the appointed place at 5pm ready for our tour.

We had to get some warmer clothes on first, and I put some long pants on over my shorts but Deb decided to change and dropped shorts in the car park, meters away from US27! However she picked the wrong pants (mine) and I’d put hers on by mistake. So much hilarity ensued as the leg of my pants gets stuck on my shoe while Deb is standing there in her undies waiting for me to hurry up. We got changed with no further dramas and boarded our Airboat. It was just the two of us and Captain Wes, nice!

It started raining quite heavily though just as we kicked off, and Wes gave us the option to wait for a while until the rain had passed but we figured we may as well carry on and hope it would pass over as we were already pretty wet.  5 minutes in, still hosing down and the rain is stinging our faces, Deb is regretting bringing her camera and paranoid it will get wet.  Then we stop suddenly and Wes made a joke about losing power. Except it wasn’t a joke, we’d blown a fuse due to the rain.  He managed to get it fixed and warned the guy left on-shore that we’d had a problem and may need rescue.  I was wondering how we would ever be found, because while there are paths thru the saw grass, they are pretty random and there was very few reference points to speak of.  Thankfully the rain stopped at this point and the weather passed, it fined up and was perfect for the rest of the trip

Wes was great, and explained that the everglades (so named because the grass is named glade, and it’s a cutting grass, and it’s everywhere) is not a swamp as such but the widest, slowest river in the world. The water moves south at a rate of 500ft per day.

The wild-life was very co-operative, we same several alligators including a Mum and about half a dozen babies.  Lots of herons and birds taking off as we whizzed thru the grass, and one grumpy old guy who waved his fist at us for swamping his boat. 

Our two hours went really fast, felt more like half that time.  But it was over so we headed back to Miami – more cussing at Dora as she lead us astray again, but we eventually got back to South Beach and parked the tank at the top of a very small carpark with very narrow tight turns weaving through it.  Spotted a Tesla in the lot using one of the free chargers, plus space for 4 more EV’s. 

Headed out for food, ravenous by now as it was about 9pm, so we stopped at the first place we came to and had a quick tea and then headed off to try and get some night shots of the art deco buildings.