Miami Vice - Part 1

 

We spent the last couple of weeks in Florida in a desparate bid to escape the gloomy weather in the UK, flying into Miami the photo above shows the view from our hotel room when we arrived, pretty decent! The mission was to soak up some tropical heat and to see some bits of Florida that we hadn't seen before. Like a lot of people we did the whole Disney, theme park thing ten years ago when our kids were young but we never really got to see the other interesting parts of the state, now that we're "empty nesters" (and my Wife officially retired at the end of February - yay!) we decided that the time was ripe to rectify that.

Miami is a very big city, I hadn't quite appreciated how large it actually was, lot's of different districts each with a fairly distinct character, and like most big cities some areas were a lot more seedy than others! Our lodgings were in the Brickall district which is probably best described as the posh business area next to downtown proper, much like the City of London sits adjacent to the West End etc. It was a good spot to stay as it's pretty central and there are tons of shops, restaurants and entertainments right there. Downtown Miami seemed a little lack-lustre in comparison, fairly run-down and scruffy but not lacking in charm, we had a good look around. Walking a lot we visited the main museums, some local craft breweries and the more touristy bay-front markets, fortunately the weather was glorious, warm and dry without the crushing humidity that Florida gets later in the year. 

(picture above is from the downtown taproom of Biscayne Bay Brewery, I know it looks like OJ but I promise you, it's beer!)

We even spotted one of these monstrous Tesla truck thingys in the wild (above), a hideous "lego-like" thing, no class or design finesse whatsoever, a completely blunt instrument. Even though we had a hire car, one of the days we decided to take the "Brightline" train up to Fort Lauderdale and from there take a boat trip around the "canals" to see the posh waterfront houses. We were quite pleased with ourselves as we booked tickets and hiked over to the main station and hopped on the train up to FL, it was very well run, clean and on time, and we thought trains in the USA were rubbish? Anyway after an enjoyable day up the coast we recamped back to Miami and had a couple of delicious craft beers at the Biscayne Bay taproom, which is close to the station.

Having done all of the recommended "Miami things" during our 5 day stay there we jumped into a hire car and headed South to the Keys aiming to get to the furthest Southerly point of the USA, Key West, more on that in a later post.