Mami Trip Pre-Game Summary

We'll post pictures a little later....

Scott and I left for Miami on Monday. We arrived late Monday night and drove down U.S. Highway 1, which is filled with all sorts of wonderful characters and sites at 11:00 p.m. Scott and I really only worried about our personal safety once on the drive to the hotel.

Driving to our hotel, passing all of the high-rise condo buildings, we thought, “Man this could be a great hotel we’re going to.” Alas, the best days for the Thunderbird Resort were probably 15-20 years ago. We found our hotel only because it was in a patch of darkness amidst all the brightly lit high-rises. Maybe it was the music, circa 1986, that was played in the Lobby or the valets who were too busy playing with their PSP’s to park cars, but something was off the first night.

Actually, it turned out OK. I wasn’t wild about it at first, but the hotel grew on me. There weren’t a lot of people there and the ones that were staying at the hotel tended to be older Europeans. The hotel sat right on the beach and it was a short walk from our rooms through the courtyard to the sand. We also enjoyed a nice open-air breakfast on our last day in Miami.

Scott and I spent Tuesday down in the Keys. We took the long way down Highway 1 and briefly detoured to visit the Miami campus. There wasn’t much to it and it looked like a lot of the older apartment buildings in the area. We weren’t too impressed. We continued our drive down through the Keys. Scott and I expected to drive over more open-water bridges, but outside of a couple of areas, it resembled the drive down to Matagorda.

In Key West, Scott and I drove through the town (it only takes five minutes) and parked downtown. A notable highlight from Key West was the wild chickens and roosters that walked freely through the streets. By chance we found Ernest Hemmingway’s house and his 50+ cats that roam through the property, including several with six toes on their front paws. Scott was a little freaked out about that. Hemmingway’s house had the first pool that was installed on the island. Originally it was a salt-water pool since the island didn’t have access to fresh water until the late ‘20s.

We finished off our Tuesday by driving back through some pretty heavy rain from a depression in the Gulf.

Wednesday, we spent the day driving through Miami itself. Since our hotel was right on the beach, we could take the A1A all the way down the Miami coastline down to the South Beach area. We spent the afternoon driving through Little Havana and did some scouting around at the Orange Bowl. Then we headed back to the hotel since everyone else was arriving Wednesday night.