Miami
The Miami part of our trip
14.05.2008 - 22.05.2008
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In 2005, we had planned a trip to Miami to see the Florida Marlins play after finding an incredible deal for the new Hilton downtown. But mother nature wasn't playing fair that weekend and both our flight and hotel reservations were cancelled due to a hurricane hitting Miami. So years later, we found ourselves with Dolphins Stadium still on our list of baseball stadiums that we hadn't made it to. After seeing that the Kansas City Royals were going to be playing the Marlins in interleague play this year, we decided it was time to try again (and this time during non-hurricane season).
We went to Miami having no expectations due to our lack of desire to go bar hopping at the "meat market" bars, the city's pretentious reputation, baseball played in a football stadium and from what other friends had said about the city. With the goal of stimulating the American economy, we packed our bags to visit this culturally diverse area of the country. Our plan was to spend a night in Miami, a night in Key West, then back to Miami before leaving for the island of Curacao on Saturday morning. I landed in South Florida armed with my National Geographic Traveler book, a list of art museums, a very hungry appetite, plenty of sunscreen and excitement for our drive down to the Keys. I was fully expecting to visit Miami and not be very impressed with it. I thought that I would have just checked it off as another place that we had visited and be done with it, but was I wrong!
Even without partying it up on South Beach with the "pretty people" and $15 drinks, we found plenty to do that keep us occupied while visiting this very Latino city. There is no shortage of art museums (yeah!) in the area and we were able to catch an incredible Alexander Calder jewelry exhibit at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. I had watched Food Network months back and caught Giada's show when she was in Miami. One of the restaurants that she had visited was Joe's Stone Crabs. At the time, I had never heard of this culinary delight and had mentally added stone crabs to my list of things to eat in my lifetime. For those of you who don't know anything about stone crabs, the crabs have small bodies that aren't eaten, but very large claws. They harvest them by removing one of the claws, then throwing them back to sea to regrow the claws. Luckily, we made it to FL just in time for the last weekend of the season (Oct 15-May 15)! Our meal of stone crabs, hash browns, cole slaw and key lime pie was AMAZING! If you love seafood and you happen to be in Miami during stone crab season, we highly recommend that you empty your wallet (it's not cheap) and eat here. The crab claws are meaty, sweet, juicy and full of flavor. We had ordered a slice of key lime pie to share (at $7.95 a piece, it's not a bargain) because I am reading 1001 Things To Eat Before You Diet by Ian Jackson and he mentions the restaurant's pie not once but 4 times in his book. After happily devouring 3/4 of the slice, I told Chris that he needed to go get another slice (his favorite dessert), which he enjoyed all by himself. It was a very thick, custard-y, tart filling with a wonderful graham cracker crust. 
Another joy of Miami is the abundance of Cuban restaurants and we took full advantage of this fact. Right before leaving for FL, I stumbled upon a wonderful website http://3guysfrommiami.com/ which was a goldmine of Cuban restaurants in the area. We ate at three of them (and the Cuban sandwich one twice), all of them bringing smiles to our faces. 
This was our favorite Cuban restaurant in Miami. It's a fish market with a huge restaurant attached. While waiting for our meal, we watched the waitress bring fresh fish from the market to the kitchen counter and listened to everyone around speaking Spanish. We ate some incredible smokey fish dip, a 1/2 lb of fried dolphin eggs (not the mammal, but the fish), a bunch of crab croquettes and shared a large plate of oven baked dolphin fish with some beans & Cuban rice (I am still wondering how they make plain white rice with so much flavor?). The bill came to our table and we both gasped that it was only $18!
We finally were able to watch a baseball game in Miami with the Royals actually winning the game that we saw on May 16th. The stadium is where the Dolphins play football and it isn't anything too exciting when the Marlins are there. The fan base is very small and the place seemed like it was only at 30% capcity on a Friday night. But we were treated to seeing the Marlin Manatees, who happened to be performing that night. You ask what are the Manatees? They are the Marlins' (overweight) all-male dance squad, the first in the major league (I am hoping the last one too). We'll spare you the pictures because it's not pretty with a couple of the members pushing 400. Yikes!
I was reading a travel magazine before the trip and noticed that the Fairchild Tropical Gardens had a Botero/Chihuly/Lichtenstein exhibit through the end of May. We suffered in some very steamy, hot weather to walk the grounds to look at all of the sculptures and glass works that had been placed around the gardens for the exhibit. We also were able to visit the Vizcaya, an Italian-style 34 room villa that sits along the water, that was James Deering's winter home from 1916-1925. The one word to describe the Vizcaya is AMAZING!
We didn't really think that we were missing out by not staying on South Beach. We had a car and it would have been a pain (and expensive to park down there). Unless you are thinking of hitting the bar scene there and drinking till the wee hours, I would recommend staying somewhere else. Maybe we are getting too old, but I like my peace and quiet.
Posted by SoCalgirl 24.05.2008 12:29 PM Archived in USA Comments (0)
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During our last trip, we decided that it was time for us to document our travels by starting up a blog. Everyone is always asking questions about our travels and advice for their future trips that we thought it would be a good idea to keep everyone up to date on our (mis)adventures. We hope that our blog will inspire our friends to enjoy their travels as much as we do and maybe even make some of you want to visit our favorite spots! We'll update the blog after our trips and hopefully even add a few more from past vacations! Please feel free to comment about our trips!
