The return of the three musketeers

The day you never thought would arrive has finally arrived. This is abso-last-lutely the last part of the Florida trip. I thought I should complete what I started. Besides, on a more evil note, at least one of my readers has complained about being sick of this series and you know how much I hate cheating people of further annoyance X-).

Continued from these parts [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6]. Okay, before you start really ruing the day I decided to make this trip to Florida, let me start!

Despite our best intentions, we were not too early in vacating the room the next morning. However, at long last, everything was packed and a final adieu to the room was bade. The checkout formalities were completed. We bought breakfast for the last time at the hotel cafe. D and me were feeling quite sad about the end of the vacation - both of us would be returning to work the next day. S though was more cheerful - she had something very nice to look forward to (which she will probably write about if she ever revives her blog) in a few days.

The plan that day was to do some kind of water-sports at the beach and then drop S off at the airport around 4.00p for her 6.00p flight. Well, that day turned out to be another one of those days where anything that could go wrong did.

We were supposed to go to Miami Beach (why Miami Beach and not South Beach? Search me - we just thought we should visit Miami Beach. Period.) We got directions from the hotel guide and he told us that we could go on Collins Ave (non-freeway route) all the way upto Fort Lauderdale. Well, we drove right past South Beach. Then we kept waiting for Miami Beach to show up and it never did (rather, we missed it).

The haphazard traffic on Collins Ave had a negative effect on driver me. Finally, as the clock ticked towards noon we were began to realize that there was no way we could do our water sports and get S back to the airport on time. So instead, we decided to focus on finding a quite beach to relax in. After a brief stop at a grocery store to buy snacks (once bitten, twice shy), we finally located parking in a strip mall (we would eat lunch there was our justification :-P) and walked to the beach.

As I have said before, the Atlantic has a lovely, lovely, lovely blue-green color to it. And, though the day was cloudy, the water was NOT cold. Now, this is a huge change from the Pacific near my place - which is always cold irrespective of weather (as far as I know, only the bay near Santa Cruz had even tolerably chilly water in summer). We were all so excited and jumped right in. We had to strive not to get too wet. Nevertheless, we had a wonderful time, walking, running and splashing in the water.

We could also see all these huge condos nearby. It would be super awesome to own one right by the beach. Anyone of you owning one has an open invitation to become my best friend :-P!

After an hour and a half, we had to get going because of our tight schedule. We reluctantly left the beach, making promises to ourselves to make a trip to Florida just to relax in the beach. Then it was lunch time. This time we went to a Peruvian restaurant called Pachamama (pacha+mama=green+earth - which is surprisingly close to the meaning of the word in Indian languages). The food was quite decent and we had a relaxing lunch.

Then it was time to get to the airport. We reached the airport quite early. So D and me dumped our initial plans of just whiling away time at the airport till our 8.00p and thereabouts flights. Instead we dropped S off and decided to go to Dana Beach, which was the beach nearest to the airport as far as we could see.

As we got off at Dana Beach, a really chilly wind had begun to blow. Finally I could feel what M had been trying to tell me about chilly weather! Finally we also found use for our jackets and snuggled comfily into it. Of course, in the beach, D and me were the only two souls doing any kind of comfily snuggling into jacket. Everybody else was still in swim-wear *sigh*. Anyways, we just sat on the sand by the water, watched the waves and enjoyed the serene scene.

About half an hour later, the cloudy day turned into a torrent of showers. D and me hurried under a thatched roof gazebo nearby. There we watched the rain and talked and talked. D is one of those friends with whom you can talk about anything at all - so I had a nice time yacking.

Finally it was time to bid adieu to Dana Beach too. The rain had stopped by then so we just spent some more time taking pictures and then proceeded back to the airport.

Afters some more minor adventures with the horrible traffic (phew - I think I have chopped at least six months off my life by driving in Miami), we were back at the airport for the final farewell - D and me were boarding at different terminals.

From then on, it was just a long blur of dinner, cat-naps, lots of flying time, a connection, a boarding-pass getting adventure in Las Vegas which almost resulted in me missing my flight and finally reaching a (oh, the irony) rainy Bay Area.

As me gushing about it for seven whole posts should have given you some clue, it was a lovely vacation and I had a super wonderful time :-)! Beaches of Miami, await my return :-D!

And yes, seriously yes! With this post, the Florida travelogue goes finis :-D!

Miami Traffic Rules

This post is based on the driving experiences we had in Miami during our visit there as described in [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6] and [7] (yes, impossible as it may be to believe, there is a part [7] and it is not published yet.)

Statutory Warning: These rules are simply basic guidelines and should not be taken as a complete reference.

If you are a pedestrian:

1. You can cross the road at any place you like. Don't worry about a ton of metal hurtling towards you at very high-speed - those metal boxes have drivers with eyes, dont they? So what if the driver in question almost expires with a heart-attack when s/he see you suddenly darting across the street when they are driving at 40 mph (such faint-hearted drivers are most probably tourists anyways).

2. Traffic lights are for wimps. If you are waiting for the light anyway, during the green signal for you, continue to stand on the starting side and talk on your cell phone or converse with your walking companions or stare at the sky or do other such urgent activities. The moment the light turns red for you is the cue for you to start crossing the road. Pedestrians are God, you know!

3. If you feel like it, dart from side to side on the middle of the road while making up your mind about which side you want to ultimately get to. It sure relieves the monotony of vehicle-filled roads for drivers.

If you are driving a vehicle:

1. Traffic lights changing from yellow to red is mostly just a suggestion for you to think about stopping. You can continue proceeding on red till cross traffic absolutely prevents you from doing so.

2. Blocking intersections is the done thing. After all, you did have a green light when you moved to the middle of the intersection and it is not your fault that the two vehicles ahead of you were unable to move up further.

3. If anyone ahead of you disobeys rule 2, honk at them and make angry faces.

4. It is perfectly okay to start new "lanes" of traffic. Isn't it kinda neat when there are four lines of vehicles on a road which has only two lanes? When used in conjunction with rule 2, you can choke an entire intersection with a row of vehicles. Cool, huh?

5. The right lane of any road though technically a part of the road is actually a convenient place for parking. Use it for parking (emergency flashers are not necessary) when you want to a) talk on your cell phone b) go shopping c) run any errand or d) simply sit in your vehicle and watch the traffic go by. This is especially funny when vehicles behind you actually wait patiently thinking that you are going to move on (naive tourists sure are a funny lot).

6. Signalling while changing lanes is an unnecessary use of vehicle energy. Come on, a big vehicle moving onto the next lane should be indication enough of the event!

7. On unprotected turns make your turn irrespective of right of way. The driver with the right of way will most probably not hit you if s/he applies the brakes hard enough as soon as you suddenly turn your vehicle into their oncoming path.

Given all these rules (which we were mostly unaware of till we put our feet or rather wheels there) you can imagine just how much "fun" D and me had while navigating the roads of Miami in the rental car. Oh well, we can now proudly say that we are now Miami-certifed drivers :-) (If you have been reading my blog for some time, you probably know that I am also a New York certified driver - ah, its comforting to know that I can always fall back on the alternate job of a cab-driver :-P.)

At this point, I am sure any person who has visited India is dying to point out: "Get off your high-horse missy, this is exactly how traffic usually is in India". You are absolutely right - but I have not driven much in India so have never had first hand experience before. So there!

Complaints about the chaotic traffic apart, all of us did enjoy the city itself immensely. The beautiful beaches by themselves will give Miami a five-star rating in any vacation guide. Next vacation in Florida will be exclusively spent on the beach :-D.

p.s. Dave Barry has an extremely funny piece about visiting Miami here.

p.s.1. I think Floridans are really nice people basically and hence if any Floridan is reading this, please to change any orders for beating me up to orders for stuffed toys/music/flowers *angelic smile*.

South Beach or something like it

Continued from parts [1], [2], [3], [4] and [5]. (And you thought I had forgotten all about it - hehehehe.)

Using the guide maps, we charted a course to South Beach. Till we got to Miami Downtown, everything went as per plan - we weren't making fabulous time but we were at least moving. However, once we got to downtown, we got stuck in the biggest traffic jam ever. Downtowns of any big city are well-known for traffic snarls. But Miami's absolutely unruly drivers made it much worse.

We barely moved. The tangles of lines of cars seemed like a gigantic immobile snake. Some construction on the right-most lane just added to the confusion and made it worse. Driver D had a tough time keeping her cool as she tried to adjust to the traffic rules according to Miami (next post on that).

Meanwhile, the first pangs of hunger began to assail us. When we had left Everglades around 4.00p, S had enquired about food. Smarty-pants me had scoffed at her - "Already?" little noting that it was actually some 5 hours since we had had breakfast and of course, nothing else after that. We had been thinking of a sumptuous dinner at South Beach and we should be there around 6.00p at the maximum, right?

Well at 6.00p we had move about 10 feet from the place we had been at 5.30p viz. middle of downtown Miami. By now the hunger pangs had burgeoned into "I cannot think of anything but food" pangs. I started to torture myself (and others) by listing all the food items I wanted to eat at that point in time. S and D were too famished to beat me up and just asked me to shut up (did not work). There was nothing to eat in the car. Thoughts of abandoning the car right there on the road and going in search of food were beginning to form in our heads.

Finally we had inched forward to an intersection where we could turn right (we were stuck on the rightmost but one lane). We realized that Gloria Estefan's Cuban restaurant Bongos was somewhere along that road and took the turn. Yup, we soon reached the driveway to the restaurant and happily parked the car in the parking lot. The suspiciously empty parking lot lodged some doubts but we pushed them away and walked up to the huge restaurant.

The menu outside featured lots of veggie items. Yaay! Now, if only they would let in people dressed as super-casually as us (with me leading the "Yaay, I look like a homeless person" list). Our hunger guards had come down by now and we were ready to plead to be let inside if necessary!

The restaurant door was open - we pushed our way in. There were a total of some 5 people inside the restaurant - all of them behind the bar. Apparently the restaurant was actually closed due to it being christmas :-(! Oh no!

There was nothing to do but curse our bad luck and trudge back to the car. We were back into the never-moving traffic. After fifteen more minutes of crawling we hit the A1A expressway which took us to the beaches.

The travelling was okay till we got close to Ocean Dr, our destination. There we got stuck in another huge traffic jam. Another 20 minutes of crawling and we were finally reached Ocean Drive. Once we hit it, we turned right instead of left as we had originally wanted to. We just wanted to get out of the car ASAP! By some miracle we found a parking spot. We dug out all the coins we had to put inside the parking meter and then set off towards Ocean Drive.

There were lots and lots of open-air restaurants lining the left side of the road. We grinned smugly at the cars still caught in the traffic jam. At the same time we were almost fainting with hunger - it was now close to eight hours since we had last seen food. At the first restaurant where we could find more than one veggie dish, we decided to eat.

First came the bread. Ah, never has bread tasted so good in my life. We literally gobbled it down. The Bruschetta appetizer lasted lesser than the time it takes to blink. The main course then arrived. We had just begun eating forkfuls of pasta when the most fitting end to our excellent evening happened. It started to rain!

In two nimble hops I leaped away from my open-air seat to under the awning on the other side. The usher (whose spot was right behind our table) jokingly held the menu open over D and S heads and urged them to stay put. But they too were contemplating following my lead. Now what?

Of course, the open-air restaurants were very well prepared for the unpredictable Miami weather. In a matter of few minutes, they had rolled out canvas roofs over our heads and we continued our dinner in peace :-)! Outside it poured without a break - we were thankful that we had made it to the restaurant before the skies opened up!

We had an extremely leisurely dinner complete with dessert and coffee. But the rain decided to not stop ever. After seeing that it showed no signs of letting up, we decided to run back to our car in the rain - after all, sleeping in the restaurant was not a viable option!

We borrowed some plastic bags from the waiter. I stuffed my handbag into one of the covers and S stuffed her bag into another. We all took a deep breath and off we were, running in the rain.

Florida rain is much nicer to get drenched in than California rain. It was warm and fun :-). We ran, giggling, to our car. All of a sudden, I could only hear the patter of my feet and no sound of S and D. I stopped, puzzled and turned around - to see S and D stopped someway behind me. S was clutching her knees and laughing and D was grinning at me. S gasped, "Oh Archu, you so look like a homeless person running like that in your shorts clutching your belongings in a plastic bag". Hmph X-(! Thanks girls!

Anyways, we finally reached the car, not completely drenched but pretty wet nevertheless. All our plans of walking up and down Collins Ave had to be dumped unceremoniously. Instead we just decided to drive down the street. We saw a couple of designer stores. But the rain and the resulting even worse traffic was making it difficult to enjoy it too much. So we just decided to get back to the hotel.

As usual, we got lost a bit and finally made it back. For the second night in a row, we trudged back to the hotel, wet and dishevelled, looking like something even a cat wouldn't bother with.

The night was still young - so we got down to doing what girls do best. Talk :-)! We talked and we talked - what we thought of excessive PDA (eeeew - ugh, Ugh, UGH!), why most guys drool sooooooo much over Salma Hayek (no conclusion) and other such topics of international significance :-P! By the time our eyes began to actually close by themselves, it was some unearthly hour.

The dawn of the next day would bring us to the last day of vacation ...

Alligator spotting at Everglades

Continued from parts [1], [2], [3] and [4].

The next day was our sleep-in day. This was to avoid a horror situation involving three zombies walking/driving in the streets of Miami (there are enough traffic horror situations in Miami as it is without our additional input). Around 10.00am, D's alarm rang. As usual, we followed our routine of ignoring the alarm until S suddenly remembered - if we did not get going soon, the hotel's cafe would soon be closed for breakfast. That woke us all up pronto!

There was no time to shower. So we all went downstairs in our gypsy states of the previous day. Mercifully, some people in the restaurant had showed up their pajamas - so we did not look too out of place! Deciding to make the meal "brunch", We dug into the breakfast buffet which had a hefty price but a decent collection of food - the pancakes and freshly squeezed juice from Florida oranges especially come to mind :-).

After a leisurely breakfast, we got ready to go to Everglades National Park - that marshy/swampy area where they have alligator farms. We first made sure that the airboat rides were open on Xmas day - mercifully they were!

The directions to Everglades were more convoluted than those to Key West, but we managed to reach there just fine without any getting-lost episodes. It was a cloudy day with threats to rain which never materialized, at least during the noon. Hmm, how is it that Florida has such copious rains just when we decide to visit it? Ah well, as we all know, it rains a lot where good people are present 0:-) - heehehhehe!

The airboat place had a cafe attached to it where they were selling, I kid you not, gator tail sandwiches!!! Whether these really referred to alligator tails or not, no one had the courage to find out. We bought the tickets for the airboat ride and waited for the next boat.

While we waited, we looked around at their collection of snakes (how many of you feel your skin creep when looking at snakes? Mine always does) in cages. There were also a wide variety of birds flying around - peahens, ducks and so on - it was a very peaceful garden. Of course, we set about taking lots of pictures.

We were called to board the boat about 10 minutes later. The airboat could carry 16 passengers and was built in a special kind of way to allow travel in the marshy backwaters. Normal boats would not work in such places. We were also given ear-plugs for use during the part of the ride when the boat's engines became too noisy.

We set off slow. Everglades is very famous for its abundant flora and fauna. Unfortunately I don't recall the names of all the bird varieties we saw. But the osprey, the egret, some kind of eagle and a bird dubbed as snake-neck bird (because of its long snake-like neck) were among them. We also saw a turtle.



And of course, we came across alligators. Of the first set we saw, one alligator was lying in the shallow water, its yellow eyes staring lazily at us. Another alligator relaxed on the mud on the shore. They did not look that dangerous from the boat - but no, I would not have got out of the boat for love or money!

The boat guide was happily telling us survival tips in case we found ourselves abandoned on one of the marshy islands - things like what to eat, what to drink, where to stay etc. Hahahahahaha - I doubt I would have recovered from the shock and fear to even necessitate knowing any of the other stuff!

Anyways he also said that the place abounded in snakes though we did not spot any. Then was the most fun part of the trip - the boat-guide gunned the engine and we went zooming through the marshy land. He also did a couple of sharp spins and turns - it was like being in the chase scene of an action movie :-D - totally cool! Of course, my hair looked like Medusa's after that trip - but yeah, it was totally worth it :-)!

From the air boat ride, it was on to an alligator show. We were ushered into a small enclosure. The show-host then said that he was looking for volunteers to wrestle with an alligator. Of course S, D and me immediately put our heads down religiously and pretended to not exist. I was whispering to D about how this reminded me of one of our classes in undergrad where the instructor used to randomly pick out students to answer questions and all of us used to have our heads buried into our notebooks in the fond hope that the instructor would not notice us.

Well, it did not work back then and it did not work now either. D was picked as "volunteer". The show-host then proceeded to tell her that he would demonstrate how to wrestle an alligator and she could then do it based on the instruction. D nervously giggled and said he was joking. I was asked to position myself beside the enclosure to capture the "fun" on camera - oh well, as long as it was not me doing any wrestling :-).


Well, the guide wrestled the alligator - again, as I have said before, I don't like shows with performing animals, so did not like it too much. But at the end of it, D was told that she need not wrestle the alligator and just needed to hold a teenager (bigger than the baby gator but smaller than an adult) alligator with a band around its snout for safety reasons - though the guide did remove the band for a short period when the gator was still in D's hands. I busily clicked pictures.

After the show, we all could take snaps holding the teenager alligator. Though I was so not for it when we entered the enclosure, I held the alligator too - it was not at all yucky as I thought it would be. The alligator was pretty heavy in spite of its small size and its skin had a cold and rubbery (not slimy) feel to it! So now we all three have alligator-women pictures :-)!

After the patel pics, we spent some more time browsing through the store and buying some more knickknacks - pretty chains, souvenir magnets etc. Then we were ready to go to South Beach where we were planning to spend the rest of the day.

To be continued...

Post script

1. D said that she had a sudden urge to hold the alligator's head against her cheek and pose for a picture. But then she thought that she wouldn't like it too much if the alligator decided that it wanted a taste of her ear and so abandoned these plans.

2. On an entirely unrelated note, it is unfair enough that if you love to eat, you HAVE to exercise too unless you are okay with looking like a blimp and/or dying of some obesity-related disease. On top of that, while it takes at least four weeks of regular exercise to get your body to even very basic endurance levels, it takes only two weeks of not exercising to absolutely lose ALL the endurance you gained with the prior months of exercising. I should know - all my fitness classes restarted this week after the holidays and I am SORE. I am re-recognizing every muscle group in my body and currently, any change of position requires lots of ouches and light, ginger and gentle movements. This ain't fair, I tell ya - *sigh*!

Key West - USA's Kanyakumari*

Continued from parts [1], [2] and [3].

Tin-tin-TIN. Tin-tin-TIN. The alarm rang with monotonous regularity at 7.15a. It was just some five hours since we had closed our eyes and none of us budged. Finally, that morning, I gave up fight first and went off to shower. We were going to Key West (a 3.5 hour journey away) and we had to leave reasonably early since we were planning to return the same day.

As usual, we breakfasted at the hotel cafe. Given our tightly planned schedules, for the duration of the entire trip, we never did manage to fulfill our ambition of going somewhere else for breakfast! After getting the surprisingly straightforward directions (go out of the hotel, turn right and keep going straight till you hit Key West), we set off.

Initially, the journey was mostly on roads with traffic signals. We got to see a good bit of Miami (and Miami traffic - that deserves an entire post by itself). That day was even hotter than the previous day. The sun shone mercilessly and we turned on the air conditioning full blast in the car. Simultaneously, S and me made the decision to buy t-shirts, shorts and slippers once we got to Key West to prevent baking/evaporating in the heat.

After a while, the commercial buildings on the sides of the road began to reduce in number. Soon, we had reached marshy areas on either side of the road and the road had changed to a two-laned one (in some places a one-lane one). Then we got to the bridges.

The tip of Florida consists of a series of "Keys" - each key referring to an island. The keys have names like Key Largo, Long Key and so on. Some of the "keys" are joined by a series of bridges. The southernmost key, which is also the southernmost tip of mainland United States is called Key West. End of Geography lesson :-).

The bridges were over the Atlantic Ocean. Atlantic ocean has such a beautiful blue-green color to it - we all feasted our eyes on it! We hardly noticed the long journey - the beautiful vistas around us and the interesting anecdotes (read gossip :-P) we had to share kept us fully occupied for the entire duration of the journey.

On the way, D had located a Jamaican restaurant in the Key West guide book for lunch. So when we reached Key West around 1.30p or so, we parked as close to the restaurant as we could. As usual D and S were stuck with eating veggie wraps (though they said it was different from the usual wraps in a nice way) while I had a fish entree (yummy).

The next stop was for summer clothing. We were midway through our shopping process when we realized that the shop had the most leching set of salesmen ever X-(! I did not get the name of the store, so cannot warn you, but it was on Whitehead road near Mallory Square and offered supposedly "great" discounts. Anyways, at the end of that shopping expedition, S and me had finally gotten into more summer-type clothes and flip-flops :-D. This trip also resulted in me walking barefoot for a short distance on the streets of Key West (don't ask how X-(!).

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Now we were all set. We enquired from our parking garage attendant about getting to the Southernmost tip. He said it was a 30 minute walking trip from where we were. But we also wanted to see the sunset which was supposed to be best viewed from Mallory Square in the exact opposite direction. Now, it was already 4.30p and and the sun set at 5.30p . The parking attendant gleefully said that there was no way we could make it for both (we wanted to see the southernmost tip in daylight).

Ah, well, we decided to see about that :-)! We set off towards towards the Southernmost tip. On the way we saw lots of quaint cottages - wish I could live there! We also saw lots of roosters *all over the place* - some of the crowed too. It felt like a village in India :-)! We walked right past Ernest Hemmingway's erstwhile house! It was a lovely walk in the fast approaching dusk. In 20 minutes, we were right up at the tip where an extremely colorful (read garish) marker proudly proclaimed "90 Miles to Cuba. Southernmost Point. Continental USA". In front of the marker was a queue of people patiently waiting to take Patel pics! So, if you ever make a really garish sculpture of some sort and want it to get a lot of attention, just put it at some significant landmark :-P!

Of course, we joined the queue too and had other people take snaps of us. We also spent sometime peering hard to check if we could spot some bit of Cuba by some chance (we couldn't). Then of course, we had to journey back to Mallory Square. That was even further up north than our parking place - so we set off at a brisk pace. The clock was close to 5.25p as we neared Mallory Square. There was a sunset festival going on - with lots of shows, food and crowds.

Amar Akbar Anthony, anyone?

A huge crowd of people had gathered to watch the sunset. S, D and me happily joined the crowd too and started watching the sun, when, all of a sudden to all our dismay a gigantic cruise ship, docked near the shore, started moving and halted, effectively blocking out the sun for all of us on the shore! A collective groan went up and mercifully, all our curses seemed to have reached the ship's captain. The ship retraced its steps and left a full view of the sun again allowing us to observe a beautiful sunset (and take some excellent pictures :-))!











Once the show got over, the crowd began to disperse. We wanted some refreshment after our rapid trotting to two ends of the island. We found a restaurant which served coffee and also ordered Key Lime Pie which seems to be a speciality of that region. That revived us. We were good to go again :-)!

We freshened up a bit to get ready to go for the Ghost tour. Unfortunately, a call to the tour operators let us know that it was cancelled on account of Christmas Eve - darn!

So there was nothing to do but find a place for supper. Our attempt to find an Indian place did not meet with success so we went to an Italian place instead. The food was pretty nice. This place had weird decoration - one dollar bills were stapled all over the place, ostensibly by the restaurant patrons - each of the dollar bills had signatures/messages of people. Even as we ate, a couple stapled a new dollar bill to one of the beams on the cieling. I was busy for a while trying to calculate how many dollars the total of all these disfigured bills would come up to (and whether I could buy a condo on Fisher Island with the money ;-)), but my brain refused to cooperate and I gave up!

Satisfied with the dinner, we set off to our car. Since we had walked a fair distance to the restaurant, we strolled back in a leisurely manner, browsing through the various stores, buying knickknacks, taking pictures and chatting.

Finally, we started from Key West around 9.00p. The first part of the journey went off in conversation but as it got late the conversation slowly died down. S went off to sleep in the back seat. D as navigator (and of course, driver me) kept awake. Finally, around 11.40p, we were nearing Miami Downtown. Ah, a couple more blocks and we would be at the hotel!

Right! All of a sudden, the road split into two without any warning and of course, we were on the wrong fork and went off into some freeway. We had a vague idea of where our hotel was from there - so we set out tracing our way back to it. And being lucky souls, we went around in circles, rectangles and other geometric shapes without finding the hotel. Now what?

Finally S (who had woken up to the sound of D's and my agitated talking) spotted the lit up sign of the hotel on a building some way behind us (as D said later, thank heavens we chose a hotel which prominently stood out or we could still be wandering there) and so we traced our route back. After one more wrong turn on a one way street and an almost wrong entry to the parking lot, we made it back almost 45 minutes after our inital expected time of arrival!

We trudged back to the hotel looking like tramps - our faces were muddy and our hands and feet were grubby after all our walking. We looked wornout and tired and pretty much like something even a cat wouldn't drag in! We were half worried that the hotel management would throw us out thinking we were trespassing but thankfully it did not happen :-)! Once back in the room, we had quick showers (no amount of sleep could help in putting off the need to feel clean).

We had had a lovely day. But to say we were darn tired would be an understatement. We were utterly exhausted! And thus, we were all deep in slumberland a short while later.

To be continued...

Post scripts

1. I drove both to and from Key West. Since both the onward and backward journeys were done without *any* breaks, it marks the first time I have driven some 340 miles on a single day in two continuous stretches of about 3 and 3.5 hours each :-D!

2. Florida seems to have a lot of Cubans. Since Indians look somewhat similar to Cubans, at some places we were mistaken to be Cubans and had Spanish sent our way (of course, our blank, dumb and uncomprehending expressions soon corrected the misconception).

3. How many of you non-veggie's out there knew Grouper was a kind of fish? At the Jamaican restaurant for lunch, I asked the waiter what a grouper was (thinking it was a group of all kinds of meat - in retrospect, yeah, that sounds dumb - thankfully I did not spell out my thoughts) and the waiter just stopped himself from rolling on the floor with laughter when asking "You don't know what a grouper is? Really? Hehehehehehe!" Hmph X-(!

4. Women-folk, next time you find the adult-sized generic souvenir t-shirts too broad/long for you, look in the Youth section - those t-shirts fit much, much better! Thanks to S for making this brilliant discovery!

* Kanyakumari is the southernmost tip of India.

Miami Heat (and rain) - II

Continued from parts [1] and [2].

So we bought our tickets for the bay cruise and jumped onto the about-to-leave cruise boat. It was a flat vessel with two decks. The lower deck was enclosed while the upper deck had all sides open and plastic chairs on it. We obviously chose to sit on the upper level. Initially everyone was staidly seated but as the boat began to move into the bay, everyone became busy taking pictures.

Miami Skyline

We had a good view of the Miami skyline. It was not anywhere near as breathtaking as that of that of NYC, Chicago or all those places - nevertheless it had a charm of its own. The islands (manmade and natural) at Miami are apparently home (okay, one of the multiple homes) to many of of the rich and famous.

Condos on Fisher Island

We first saw Fisher Island where condos sell at upward of $(insert crazy number here) million per unit. A bit too hefty a price maybe but apparently you can rub shoulders with the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Boris Becker and other such people if you own a place there! Oh well, California lottery is still open I hear :-)!

Gloria Estefan's modest ;-) house

We were also entertained with lots of interesting anecdotes from the recorded voiceover and were busy clicking pictures. We also saw another of the insanely rich housing communities on an island called, appropriately, Star Island. Gloria Estefan, Shaquille O Neil and a bunch of other celebrities own homes there. After some time of hearing prices of those houses, $5 million began to sound very cheap to me :-)!

The biggest (and priciest) house on Star Island

There was a brief lull in the sightseeing when we were travelling in the ocean and the captain invited us all to take pictures up front if we wanted. Being true Patel-snap enthusiasts, S, D and me immediately rushed into the cabin and took pictures posing with the captain's cap and holding the navigation wheel (er, what is the correct term for it - tiller?) of the ship :-D.

M who had been watching over our stuff for us (she being a Miami-resident and all refused to do touristy stuff like that - hehehehe) told us that a bunch of male passengers had been laughing at the Patel-picture-taking antics of us "silly girls". Well, sometime later, we saw them sneak to the captain's cabin to take pics too - hah and double hah :-P!

Cruise Ship!

Miami is also apparently called the Cruise Capital of the World. Many, many cruise ships depart from its shores. As proof, we could see multiple cruise ships (they are HUGE - did not realize they were quite so big!) docked by the shore!

Cruise ship behind waving palm trees

By now almost an hour had passed since our departure. The diffused sunlight was playing on the waves and formed pretty sparkles. A mild and refreshing breeze blew around us. The gentle rocking motion of the boat seemed like a lullaby. Yeah, you guesed it, M and D fell fast asleep in their chairs :-))!

Some bridge

But they woke up after a pretty quick cat nap. The rest of the cruise consisted of seeing some more pricey homes (and absolutely no occupants of those houses - really, do people live in those houses?) and cruise ships. Then, we were back on dry land! We decided to spend sometime looking through the stores in the Bay Side area. Everyone bought minor things.

We then spotted a stall selling fresh juice of all kinds. And guess what, they were selling freshly pressed karumbu (sugar cane) juice. Yipeeeee :-D! We decided to try out with one glass first - but soon the number of orders had increased to three (D, woman of steel, refused to succumb to temptation). I blissfully savored that long forgotten taste - *yummmy* :-D!

Give me a book and a deck chair and I would be all set in this place!

We wandered some more and took a lot more pictures. It was awesome to see the bay fringed with palm trees. Since we had plans of clubbin' that night, we had to conserve some energy. So we decided to head back to our car and then back to the hotel. A was to pick up M from the hotel (she had to leave as she had guests coming over to her house the next day and being a married woman and all was making an elaborate dinner).

S, D and me decided to find out more about the night life in Miami. Enquiries at a Starbucks (the ask the locals policy) brought recommendation for a dance club called Space. So, Space we decided to go! But first, a break at the hotel!

On reaching the hotel, we bade goodbye to M and went back to our room. D, S and me - all of us had, true to our "seasoned traveler" tag, smartly started packing only after 10.00p before the night of our trip - this process had gone on for a while resulting in a big sleep deficit for all of us.

The bed looked very inviting and S and me crashed immediately and slept well for around 30 minutes while D channel surfed. After that it was time for dinner. We decided to check out the hotel's restaurant and finally went to their sports-bar for food (the proper restaurant did not have any veggie options but the sports-bar did)!!

After dinner, we decided to spend some time by the outdoor pool. It was wonderful balmy weather and we talked about all random topics under the moon :-)!

Around 10.30p we decided to get ready to go night-life checking and took a cab to Space. The music was mostly middling to downright bad. The dance floor took some time to warm up but the crowd began to gather after a while. So we were finally safely able to lose ourselves in it and dance with the least danger of being seen :-D! We had good fun dancing (or more accurately, waving hands and legs about) for an hour before we decided to call it a night. We were going to Key West the next day and so had to get up early.

Once we got back to the hotel, we all hit the sack without any further ado!

To be continued ...

Miami Heat (and rain) - I

Continued from here.

The next day morning dawned bright and clear. Actually, I am guessing on that. Of course, D and me were still fast asleep at dawn :-D. When the alarm rang at 8.20a, we both pretended to not hear it (it was just 5.20a for us west-coasters) and snuggled further into our respective comforters. D finally gave up the fight first and went off to shower - after all we had to get ready soon to be able to pick up S from the airport at 10.00a.
The outside was cloudy - but from even within the airconditioned comfort of our room, it looked hot outside. Stepping onto the balcony confirmed my doubts. Unfortunately, given my brilliant winter-clothes packing skills, I had no choice but to slip into my long-sleeved shirt and pants and shoes.
When D (dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and shoes) and me descended down to the hotel lobby, we stuck out like sore thumbs in a sea of people in bermuda shorts, t-shirts and flip-flops. Oh well, we had to show we are even more touristy than normal tourists, right!

After a fairly leisurely breakfast of cereals and coffee, D and me went to the parking lot. We were still walking around in circles, trying to locate our car in the spiral parking structure when my cell-phone rang. S' plane had just landed at the FLL airport - oh shucks!
Bucking up, we set off. The ride to the Fort Lauderdale city was fairly fast. But once we got into FLL airport, our nightmare started. Four lanes of jam packed vehicles greeted us. We inched forward millimetre by millimetre. After some 25 excruciating minutes inside the airport, we finally made it to terminal 3 (the journey from Miami to Fort Lauderdale city itself had taken only fifteen minutes) where S was waiting.

We spotted S - but of course, amidst all that chaos, the only car the airport officers could think of regulating was our poor car. A female officer kept banging on our car to move on even as we tried to tell her that S was right behind the car. Finally, in a thrilling sequence, S caught up with the car and jumped into the back seat with her suitcase and all even as D slowly maneuvered the car away from the kerb. Phew!

The third travelling musketeer had also arrived :-D!

On the way back from the airport, I called up M who lives in Miami for directions to her apartment - we were spending the day with her. Her husband A had politely declined our offer of chauffeuring us around (hehehehe, I bet he could have though of only about a gazillion better things than taking a bunch of giggling girls around downtown Miami).

As we made our way to M's place, like the cloudy skies of the morning had foretold, the heavens opened up into furious rain. We reached M's place in the pouring rain. M and A had gathered umbrellas and other rain paraphernalia to guide us to their apartment in a dry state. The moment we all safely reached inside the apartment, it stopped raining. Grr!

M commented on our (and specifically my) highly-religious-Arab-woman like clothing (hmph X-(- read postscript 3 below for explanation). However, S said that I had lost weight since the time I had met her in May - yipeeee (S, I love you gal :-D). S, D and me then eagerly pounced upon the fruitcake M and A served us. After some more chit-chat and snap-taking, it was time to set off to Bay Side.

Bay side is situated in downtown Miami and is something like Pier 39 in San Francisco. It has lots of restaurants and shops and is also the starting point of cruises around the Miami Bay. M confidently said that she would navigate us to the place. M displayed such excellent navigation skills that we drove right past Bay Side and realized that only a mile later. Finally we wound up parking our car about a mile away from Bay Side! But mercifully, it had stopped raining and we had a pleasant walk.

Ah, I must mention the weather! Forget about warm winter temperatures! The muggy and sunny weather could have easily rivalled some of the summer time temperatures of the California Bay Area! This is the first time in the US that I have been to such a warm place in winter and it was bliss :-)!

Once we reached Bay Side, D made a clothing stop at Guess while the rest of us wandered around and took enlightening pictures under a gigantic banyan tree. Oh, I should mention - the whole of Miami reminded me so much of Chennai! Both places enjoy tropical climate - hence the houses, trees, etc. seemed to look very similar.

The next stop was for lunch. A had told us about a Cuban place (we wanted to try Cuban food) - unfortunately they did not have veggie options (D and S are vegetarians). So we finally wound up at Hooter's restaurant instead - the choice had been between Chilis and Hooters - we chose the latter because we wanted to see what all the fuss was about ;-)!
Lunch done, we set off to buy tickets for the cruise around Miami Bay.

To be continued ...

Post-scripts
1. Yes, I intend to make it a microscopically detailed "travelogue" - so please to have your popcorn and soda ready (I sure hope at least one soul reached till here *bambi eyes*).

2. I never realized extremely humid air could play so much havoc with hair (considering I am originally from super-humid Chennai). Within 2 hours of being outside in Florida, my poor hair's texture had reached that of coconut fibre and only using a hair-band stopped it from looking like a sparrow's nest. Hmph! So much for spending time straightening it before I left California X-(!

3. If you want to find out weather forecast for a place, find it on a weather website. Do not ask your friends who live in that place. When I had called M the previous week, she had told me that it was slightly chilly. I had done all my clothes packing based on that (agreed, I erred on the side of way too much caution). After being in Miami for only a couple of hours, I concluded that there was no way that the place could even get near chilly and M must have been hallucinating when she said the weather had been chilly - the last day of stay proved me wrong though! So lesson for the day is: check for weather forecasts on weather web-sites!

Miracle on Flight 160

Last week early noon on Friday, I set off to the airport from work. This time, the destination was Miami, Florida. My colleague N dropped me off at the airport. As a part of my usual preparation for long flights, I bought food at the airport - a nice plain bagel sandwich filled with sun-dried tomato spread and veggies. I decided to eat it on the flight (to while away an extra fifteen minutes on my pretty long flight to Houston where the layover was).

Reading my book and observing other passengers helped me easily while away time till boarding. Soon after taking off and reaching cruising altitude, I pulled out my sandwich and smugly ate it even as they announced something about the complimentary beverage service on the flight. All satiated, I settled back into my economy-class seat while the beverage cart trundled past my row.

Then, up ahead, I could hear the stewardess say to a passenger "Would you like pizza?". Huh? Pizza? Oh, maybe we had to pay for it. But then, before my disbelieving eyes, the airhostess handed out hot pizza, a box of salad and a chocolate bar to all passengers!

Yes, they were serving actual food on the plane. My jaws dropped open. This is the first time this event is happening to me on a US-domestic flight since the meal I got on a flight in the summer of 2002. Miracles will never cease. In a daze, I took the pizza and salad my neighbor passed to me.

Of course at that point, I was already stuffed with my bagel sandwich. But then, you don't say no to miracles. So I dutifully finished half of the mini-pizza and most of the salad.

In case you are wondering which airlines performed this miracle, it is Continental Airlines. A word of caution though, it is quite possible that this miraculous event happens around Christmas time only. So don't blame me if your next Continental flight kindly offers you "a beverage of your choice" (and only a beverage of your choice) for your 4+ hour flight!

Anyways, my stop-over was in Houston. I continued my reading/observing activities at the Houston airport while waiting for D to turn up. D was flying in from Seattle and by happy coincidence we had got the same connecting flight from Houston to Fort Lauderdale (FLL).

D arrived and within the first few minutes of our meeting excitedly told me about how she had got an actual "meal" on her flight (she had flown on Continental too) - LOL - so I wasn't the only heathen disbeliever :-))! Anyways, we then had dinner (just to clarify, I might be a glutton but in this case, a significant amount of time had elapsed since the lunch miracle) and boarded our flight to FLL.

We had, of course, been chattering non-stop all the while till then. Boarding the flight changed nothing and we kept up a constant flow of conversation without wasting a single minute on the 2 hour flight :-)) - it was super fun catching up!

Our arrival at FLL happened past midnight. The first thing which struck me when we got off the flight was the blast of warm air which hit us. Warm air at midnight in winter? Uh-huh, maybe I should not have packed quite as many full-hand shirts as I had. Oh well, it was too late to start having those reflections.

We picked up D's checked-in baggage and then proceeded to pick up our rental car. From there to the hotel in Miami was a not bad 25 minute trip. Our hotel was bang in the middle of downtown Miami and we got a room right on the 22nd floor where the view of the downtown was super awesome :-D!

The beautifully lit up Bank of America (BoA) building. Note the golden snow flakes - the flakes alone were no longer lit-up after Christmas!

Another view of nighttime downtown Miami.

The same view in day time.

And, two of the three travelling musketeers had arrived :-).