South Florida

Chapter Sixteen – Life Goes On

Laura’s sister, Diana and her family had moved from California to south Florida for her husband’s job. Although it was a 16 hour trip, we could drive to visit them now instead of having to fly to California. At first we would go down for a Christmas here and a Thanksgiving there. When the kids were young, they required more attention, so I didn’t get to do much away from the house during our visits. Once they got older, I got to explore, as I am wont to do.

As I love cities, my first exploration was Miami. There’s something about Florida cities that seem different to me. Rather than cities, they just feel like towns with big buildings. I felt like that in Jacksonville and Tampa and Miami felt the same.

I drove around downtown, then out to Miami Beach, which is across a bay on some barrier islands. South Florida has a LOT of money. As you drive across the bay, there are small, private islands off the highway in the middle of the bay with amazing homes. Driving north from Miami Beach with the intracoastal waterway on the west between the barrier islands and the mainland, I took in all the incredible mansions that run up the coast.

On another visit, I decided I was going to go to Key West and back, about a four hour drive each way. On a sunny day, the drive is beautiful with crystal clear blue water. Once you get onto the Keys at Largo, it is a long highway down the string of islands with connecting bridges. Seven Mile Bridge has been used in several movies. 

Key West is the last island and the most developed. It is an interesting mix of quaint, old buildings and third-worldish looking areas with chickens running around. We drove through town and Laura being Laura, she wanted to find a beach to chill on. But by the time we found it, of course it started raining. We thought about staying the night but didn’t really like the atmosphere and headed back. 

In the ensuing years since I had first rooted for the Miami Dolphins against my future brother-in-law’s 49ers in the Superbowl, I had dealt with great frustration as year after year, the incredible, record-breaking quarterback, Dan Marino never got back to another Superbowl. Now he was going to retire. I had never been to a professional football game but we were down in Florida on the Monday of his last home game. This would be the only opportunity I would ever have to see him play in person. I decided to go down to the stadium to see if I could pick up a reasonably-priced ticket.

The game was sold out but there are always illegal ticket scalpers trying to sell tickets on the street. I parked and walked to the stadium with guys asking me if I wanted to buy or sell tickets along the way. I think that’s the way they pretend to not be doing something illegal. I wanted to fully scope out the situation first and find the best price before I bought. I would ask them how much and they would ask me if I was a cop.

I got to the stadium and saw a group of people standing in one spot holding different amounts of fingers in the air. I realized they were letting others know how many tickets they were looking for. I went over and held up one finger. People came and sold tickets to some of the people and off they would go. I’m guessing these sellers weren’t scalpers. They were just people with extra tickets.

It didn’t work for me. The game was about to start and anyone left dispersed. I started to walk back down the street. There were still scalpers hanging around. As the game had now begun, I hoped they would be willing to bring their prices down further. They didn’t seem to. I was going back and forth in my mind about whether it was important enough to me to spend what they were asking. I finally decided it was. I bought a ticket, went into the stadium and found my seat way up high. 

As I had never been to a game, I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect. You certainly can’t see as well as on TV. Most of the time, I couldn’t tell what kind of play was even happening. Marino had a bad game and the Dolphins lost. But it was worth it to at least see him play once in person, if only from a great distance.

There wasn’t much more I wanted to do in South Florida. As time went on and the kids got older, my family would go down without me. Diana had a pool, so they would go down for weeks at a time. We started our own Christmas and Thanksgiving traditions so Laura wanted to stay home for the holidays. In fact, we even started a tradition of Diana’s family coming to us every other Thanksgiving. 

A couple of Laura's Florida nieces


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