To celebrate St. Valentines day this year we combined business with pleasure, as usual, and took a much needed escape (I mean trip) to Miami. We found a book distributor (NOT - more about this later) in Ft. Lauderdale who sold books by the pallet. We decided to go down and check them out to see if the books were worth our time. On the way down we stayed in Orlando and went to Universal Studios for dinner. We didn't care much about going to the theme parks, but just outside the entrance to the theme park is the Universal Studios Mall. It is an open air mall with about 20+ resturants. The largest two resturants there, in size and name, are the Hard Rock Cafe and Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville, where we ate. The atmosphere at Margaritaville was fun and of course laid back. They had a solo gutairist who was loads of fun with his crowd interraction. After dinner we decided to go play a round of putt-putt at a course across the street from our hotel. I won the putt-putt game, even after landing in the ruff, but Scott beat me at the air hockey table in the game room afterwards. These first photos were taken with a cell phone so the size is pretty small.
Hard Rock Universal Studios
Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville Universal Studios
Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville Universal Studios
My expert golfing landed me here.
The Nascar Budweiser Car at Universal Studios
The next day we headed for Ft. Lauderdale and the so called book distributor. I say "so called" because we were expecting a warehouse with stacked pallets of books and what was actually there when we arrived was a 30' x 100' "warehouse" full of mostly made in Taiwan items. He had books in the back of the unit, but most had either fallen off their pallets, been crushed, or been subjected to so much humidity they were coated with mildew. We opted out of taking a pallet home and decided to continue looking elsewhere. This meant that the utility trailer that we had taken with us to bring back a pallet was still empty and that we now had room to take home a few plants from the wholesale nurseries in Miami. Yipee!!
Miami was packed with traffic congestion everywhere we went, but we managed to make it to the hotel and to dinner on South Beach. The water and sand was wonderful, but we have ruled this out as one of our spots to frequent because of the shear number of non-tourist people everywhere.
Beats the 40 degrees back home!!
The Hotel
Scott on the beach outside our hotel.
The temp may be 84, but the water is still cold!!
Walking with sand between your toes, what could be better?
Cleveland's Miami BeachWe took the Hwy 997 route back home where we picked up some fabulous plants for our new house and a Key Lime tree just for the fun of it. Across the Everglades and up through Sarasota. The weather was changing as we were on our way back up north. The wind picked up and the temprature dropped from a cold front that was blowing through. We went to the beach anyway. Our last evening we ate at Boston Market (one of my favorite places) and stayed at a Comfort Inn Suites in Ocala that had been open about 2 weeks. It was probably the nicest, cleanest, and best smelling hotel we have ever stayed in. Then it was back to the house and back to searching for more suppliers for books.
Bird on Sarasota Beach
Me, cold again....
