Miami Beach

In case you haven't noticed, I tend to do things in spurts.  I'll blog a lot all of a sudden and then it will be months before I blog again.  Most of this I like to say is because I got busy and I haven't been traveling a whole lot.  In any case, I never blogged about my trip to Miami back in January.  I just went through all the pictures and even though I was only there for a few days it appears that we did quite a bit.

Its easier to tell the story through pictures - mostly because I don't remember everything which is sad.

Prepare yourself for a lot of pictures.  Its my favorite thing to post.

So these first two pictures go together.  They're actually of a hotel where people like Marilyn Monroe and the President have stayed.  They stay in that very top room in that tall tower.  This huge hotel is right smack in the middle of a residential area.  It doesn't make a whole lot of sense.  But, its a pretty sweet place to see.  We saw this on a city tour.

This is probably one of my favorite pictures ever.  EVER.  We are in Little Havana.  Before we even got to Miami we planned on getting to Little Havana.  We wanted to spend a whole day there, eating Cuban food and the like, but, we eventually realized that South Beach, where we stayed, was about a half hour away from Little Havana.  We were disappointed to say the least.  So, we are in Little Havana now, we either just got a Cuban sandwich or were about to get one.

So, what the heck is going on in this picture?  I'm posing with a cigar and the man who made it that's what.  This shop is the "only" hand rolled cigar shop legal in the United States and supposedly makes its cigars as close to Cuban cigars as possible.  I put only in quotes because you can only believe so much a tour guide tells you.  This man was hand rolling the cigars right in the front of the shop.  I asked him politely for a picture in Spanish and we took one, then he handed me the hugest cigar I've ever seen.   Overall, it was pretty sweet.  We did not buy any.  I don't smoke cigars so I have no reason to buy one.

This is after the whole city and boat tour we did.  We had some time to kill before the bus picked us back up again.  So what do we do?  Drink cocktails.  Actually, that had been our plan all along.  When in Miami...These drinks were quite delicious, and mine at least was very strong.  That little test tube you see in there, poking out?  That was filled with dark rum.  I'm not a fan of dark rum, it has a very strong flavor.  Anyways, there was a boat tour attached to our city tour.  I was excited to see Biscayne Bay.  I'm a sucker for natural things so I was excited to see this must see bay.

Either I booked the wrong tour, or all the travel sites misled me.  Biscayne Bay tours go around the man made (some of them are) islands and show you houses of "stars".  We saw J. Lo's, Enrique Iglesias and some other people's ginormous mansions.  I mean, they were pretty and all, but I didn't need a boat ride to see houses, because honestly I didn't really care.  One quote on that tour though that was my favorite, "You may see some houses that we're not talking about.  Don't worry about them, they're not important people."  Like seriously?  There were much nicer houses that I saw that weren't ridiculous or rented out by Usher for a party.  But who cares if they're a doctor or some business guy changing the world.  They don't matter.  Ha, clearly I was not the target audience for this tour.

We did see the house owned by the guy who owns the company that invented Viagra.  He spent $10,000 on South African Palm trees for his yard.  That is, every tree cost that much.  He had 30 of them.  I don't even know what to say to that.  Its just too absurd to deal with.

Me being the nature freak that I am and being RIGHT NEXT TO THE EVERGLADES.  We went to the everglades.  After this tour however, I started to question my ability to find good tours.  Then again, the everglade tour was nothing like the swamp tour in Louisiana.   Anyways, the everglades looked nothing like the pictures I saw.  I assume those pictures were taken further north.  I was disappointed on this tour, but it was still fun to ride a fan boat again and see some alligators.  The everglades are huge, and not very deep as you can see by this man standing in it.

This was a tree we saw at Gator Park.  There was a peacock in it at one point.  I liked the tree.

This just amused me.  I don't know how that hen got in that bin, but it was comfortable.  And, there was no way I was going to look for anything in that sale.

Whenever there is an option to either hold and alligator, or eat it you must do it.  Hopefully, you won't be eating the alligator that you were just holding.   This guy was 3 or 4 years old.  He was quite heavy.

 So, this trip got a lot crazier when we realized this was happening.  The man in the picture was from Notre Dame and he was playing the bagpipes on the beach.  The football championship was happening the Monday we were leaving so there were Alabama fans and Notre Dame fans.  It got ridiculous.

We managed to get to the beach every day.  This particular day, we stayed there the whole day.  It was quite awesome.

So along with the craziness of that bagpiper, there were other events going on that were connected with this football game.  FREE EVENTS.  That means, we could show up no questions asked.  This picture was taken at a FREE Flo rida concert.  We were in a sea of people.  I don't think I've ever seen that many people all smashed into the same place before.  I didn't remember who Flo Rida was until he started playing/singing/rapping his songs.  I knew almost all of them.  It was awesome.