Trip to Miami

My trip to Miami was a long awaited one, however it was full of problems right from the start. The plan was to fly from London Heathrow via JFK through to MIA. The first problem we encountered was that the plane ticket from JFK to MIA was not booked - the travel agent kept reassuring me that all is fine, however it turned out it wasn’t and the problem got fixed less than 24hr prior to departure. The next problem was printing a boarding pass on the airport - the machine thought we were flying to NL! That lifted my blood pressure right sky up. Once this was sorted I was in need of a large beer. The trip itself was fine until we got to JFK where we spent ages looking for the right terminal and travelling back and forth around the vast airport on a small train. We finally found the right terminal, when a Delta man just came up to us and put our luggage away - and I prayed till we landed in MIA that the luggage was with us. It was all fine till we wanted to rent the car at 1am in the morning - credit card was required, but both of us had debit cards. The man finally decided to make us a favour when G’s card would not work. Gosh. In US without a car! Well, T saved the day, my debit card miraculously worked. All, fine, luggage in the car, when the GPS failed, oh no, minor issues solved and towards the hotel. We get a key, open the door and see a family in our room! Back down we go - they had given us the wrong key! We went for a walk on the beach after all this stress and slept soundly till the next sunny morning. It was Tuesday, the day was fantastic, spent the whole day in the sea, swimming, having fun, visiting Ocean Drive and drinking $56 cocktails! Well, only one. After a short rest we went to Key Biscane and Virginia Key for another swim.

On Wednesday morning we packed our bags early and headed towards the Keys. The trip was wonderful, we stopped many times to go swimming, had a wonderful shrimp lunch and reached Key West by the evening - there were lots of funky tourists in the main market area by the seaside, however everything shut down at 9pm. As we stayed right opposite the Hemingway House this was the first attraction we visited on Thursday morning after breakfast. The house is a must see, lovely building with a huge pool and loads of six-toed cats.The tour guides are funny telling interesting stories about Hemmingway and his wife. The next must see attraction was the Southernmost point sign - 90 miles to cuba! We managed to park the car on the same street, bought a coconut and waited in line for 20min to get a picture with the sign. Ahh, like real turists. Then we headed back through all the Keys and stopped in Coconut Groove and had a stroll alongside marina.

Friday morning came quickly and we met up with Katie and Vasilis and decided to go to the Everglades, the Gator Park. It was an average experience, a 30min airboat ride to see the aligators in the water and then a show. The most interesting part was when they let us hold baby aligators in our hands. I enjoyed that and overcame my fear! After all this we went to Bayside for late lunch or early dinner, seafood again and had a lovely time just relaxing and chatting away. We were meant to meet up in the evening to go for drinks in famous Fountanbleu Hotel when my eye got swollen up and Gregor had to take me to the ER to Mt Sinai Hospital in Miami. But the hospital experience is a whole story on its own.