Miami

So Tropical Storm Alberto put a damper on our east coast Florida trip. We were scheduled to leave Miami on Tuesday for Cocoa Beach and the Kennedy Space Center before going further north to Jacksonville, then Orlando, and back home to Sarasota. We canceled that portion of our tour due to weather and decided to spend a few extra days in Miami.

So Miami, for us, started on Monday, when we finally met Bob Hunter of Stork Avenue fame! He has a great office on the top floor of the Bank of America building in Coral Gables. Bob is so interesting! His office wall is filled with pictures of people he's met and places he's been ... what a golden life he's lead. It is good to be Bob Hunter :) And he truly loves south Florida, so it's great to see this part of the state through his eyes.

He took us to lunch at the diner next to his office where I was served the largest cobb salad on earth. After that Casey and I walked around Grand Avenue and did a little shoppin'. Later that night Bob, his wife and two kids took us to dinner at Cafe Tu Tu Tango (an artsy tapas restaurant) in our new duds. It seems like we've done nothing but eat since we got here. Really we've done lots of other stuff too, but we did eat fried alligator on this night! And more surprisingly, it was good! For the first time since we got to Florida Casey actually felt like she was in control of the gator situation :)

Tuesday rolled around and Casey and I went to the Miami Sea Aquarium on Biscayne Bay per Bob's advice. We had a spectacular time. They don't have many dolphins and Killer Whales in Albuquerque you know. So we looked at a few exhibits (including the Manatee pool - these are amazingly graceful creatures) and saw all of the afternoon shows that we could squeeze in ... my favorite was the Dolphin Show. They played a little Ozzy Ozbourne during the "let's get wet" portion of the show and took me back to my roots :) Oh Oh Oh, and we also saw the original flipper, from the 1964 tv show. A real live celebrity sighting!

After that we went home, ate dinner at the hotel's happy hour (they have free breakfast and light dinners here ... nice) and spent our evening writing post cards and relaxing on the couches (and of course updating you on our blog). We were thinking about going to the Keys tomorrow, but I think we're going to skip that. It's supposed to rain :(

So we've got two more nights in Miami, then we need to figure out where we're going to go next!