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I arose early on Tuesday, put on my shorts, and headed down to the Fitness Room of the hotel to do my every-other-day mile run on the treadmill. (I've been doing this regimen for over 20 years, and I hate every minute of it. And as time goes on, there are more and more minutes to hate. The only redeeming factor about it is that it makes me feel virtuous.) I came back up to the room to find that the key-card wasn't working. Grrrr! Holiday Inn got a yellow flag, lost 10 yards, and had to repeat the down.
Jenny has spent most of her life in Vermont, except for about 20 years when she lived in New Jersey, where I met her and fell in love with her. The two things she said she missed most when she moved back to Vermont in 2003 were me and the beach. While she was in Jersey, one of our favorite places to go was Sandy Hook National Park on the Jersey Shore. In Vermont, she's hundreds of miles from the ocean. We were in Florida; we had to go to the beach. So Hugh Taylor Birch State Park was the first stop on our agenda this day..
Hugh Taylor Birch State Park
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* My thanks to Amy Hopkins for identifying the species.
Hugh Taylor Birch State Park was a short ride from the hotel. The temperature in the low 60s did not entice us into the water, and most of the other beach-goers seemed to be in agreement. (Although I'll bet the water temperature probably would have been relatively comfortble.) But a walk on the beach is always nice, and we set off for a stroll. Photo 43 is much like what I'm used to at Sandy Hook. But rotate 90° and Photo 44 reveals the difference between Sandy Hook and Fort Lauderdale. Developers have scarfed up every square inch of beachfront property, and built condos and hotels to house as many rent-paying and tax-paying inmates as they could squeeze in. The park stands out starkly the way Central Park claims prime Manhattan real estate. I'll betcha the condos in Photo 45 are going for a pretty penny.
Various jetsam along the beach sprouted barnacles (Photos 46 & 47), which I don't see in my more northern clime. And there were other rather pretty sea-critters I didn't recognize. The gulls (Photos 49 & 50) were familiar to me, and I can watch them wheel and glide for hours. They are eveidently more acclimated to human presence than the ones I'm used to. The Sandy Hook gulls would never let me get as close as the one in Photo 50.
We strolled for maybe a mile or so, taking out time, and being in the moment, and then turned back for the car.On the way back we were accosted by a friendly Jewish couple, Razy and Yitzi, who asked me to take their picture. I reciprocated with the same request. They were evidently of an Orthodox sect, as indicated their unconventional beachwear. It brought to mind the "Islamic bikini" worn by a woman of that faith we saw on a beach in St. Maartin on a vacation we took in 2012.
Oops!
At this point in the narrative, I made a big mistake. A mistake not on our trip, but in preparing this Travelogue. I had taken close to a hundred photos during the trip. When I started to prepare this report, the first thing I did was to upload all the photos from my camera into a dedicated folder on my computer's hard drive. Then, because that folder is doubly backed up onto an external hard drive and the cloud, I felt it was safe to delete the photos from my camera. When I started actually writing the text, I discovered that not all the photos had been transferred to my computer before I wiped the camera's memory, and every picture I had taken after this point in the narrative was lost.
Rats! The rest of this Travelogue will be considerably less coloful.
Frost Museum
Next stop in today's rambles was to be the Phillip & Patricia Frost Museum of Science in Miami proper. It was about an hour's drive by way of multi-lane, heavily trafficked I-95, and no fun to get to. It is a glitzy new museum in Miami proper, and normally the type of museum that suits my fancy, as Jenny well knew when she put it on the day's agenda. Inexplicably, I found it quite unmemorable, and without the photos to prod my recollection, the experience remains largely a blank in my mind, except for one or two highlights.
I was quite hungry by the time we arrived, so the first stop was the cafeteria, where I ate my first "Impossible" (meatless) cheese burger. It surprised me by being pretty good. The aquarium was very nice, and featured a transparent tank several storeys tall. There was an exhibit on aeronautics, where I rose to the challenge of folding a paper airplane that would fly straight for a long distance when launched from a mechanical catapult. I failed miserably. I slept through the iMax movie, and then it was closing time.
Luna Star Cafe
Last year, when I was looking for other possible places to play while I was down for the Festival, I ran across the Luna Star Cafe in North Miami. I had spoken with Alexis Rouse, the proprietor, and learned that they were already booked for that time period. But they did have a jam sesson every Tuesday evening, in which I would be invited to join. So we headed back north to see what that was like.
The Luna Star Cafe is a funky storefront establishmen in a funky neighborhood of N. Miami. Alexis is a funky aging hippie, who serves as owner, booker, chief cook-and-bottle-washer, custodian, and center of a community of similarly-oriented musicians and music lovers. I felt right at home. We ordered dinner, and about 45 minutes later a bunch of folks started trickling in carrying instrument cases. A really nice session ensued, mostly of cover songs of pop music from the 60s through the 80s, mixed in with occasional originals, some country & western, and traditional folk. They were in large part good singers and players, offering lots of opportunities for harmonies and lead guitar work. The style of music was not so much in Jenny's wheelhouse, but she assured me she enjoyed the session. Alexis enjoyed what I did, and I might find a gig there if I can combine it with others on the same trip.
Around 10:00 we called it a night and headed back to the hotel.