Key West, the Bahamas, and Miami
The Norwegian Cruise Line Ship “Sky” (December 2018)
We decided a long time ago that the best vacation for our family is a cruise. Tracey and Virginia can soak up the sun by the pool. Lillian hates the sun because she burns so easily and she like Karaoke so she has something to do. Grant likes the comedy shows and the trivia games so he is happy. Everyone has constant access to the buffet. I like sharing the excursions together and having family time at breakfast and dinner.
Second only to enjoying long meals with my family, I like to get up early and go to the gym to work out when it opens. I'll wait outside the door, standing alongside the other die-hard gym rats, and stretch until the gym opens up. The weight room is hardly used at that hour, so I start with resistance training and then go to the yoga class. After limbering up, I go for a run and then meet my wife for breakfast. No one has to abide by my schedule, and I am sure that they would not follow it no matter what coaxing I did, so I am free to do as I like. In the afternoon, I feel the need to retreat and I find an out of the way nook to hide in and read for a while. Before I know it, it is time to line up for dinner and I will meet the rest of the family in the main dining room. Everyone is in a good mood and eager to share their day with the rest of the group.
The purpose of the trip was to spend some time together, so I only ordered two rooms on the cruise ship and there were three people in each cabin. I was expecting for the third person in our small room to get a bunk bed but instead there was a pull out sofa for the third bed and it blocked the door every time we opened it up. The result was that when I left the cabin early in the morning I had to climb over Tanner. It was like a comedy sketch from Saturday Night Live because any time we moved around the cabin we were tripping over each other. When I remarked that Tanner had been a good Joe about it, Lillian responded with, “Well Virginia has not been a good Joe about it” because she complained whenever someone climbed over her bed.
To fill in some of the down time on the ship the cruise director held games like Pool Olympics, Majority Rules, and The Perfect Couple. The competition that stuck with me more than the others was the “Mr Sky” contest where volunteers were called up on stage and encouraged to perform sexually suggestive dances. The volunteers included a man with Downs Syndrome, a Dad with a huge paunch, and a couple of truly buff guys. Watching this parade of dancers in the front row were three little girls, a couple of mothers, and a grandmother who used a walker to get to her seat. I thought that the parents of the three little girls would have a lot of explaining to do some day and probably the little girls would not thanks their parents for taking them to the show. Instead, they will have to spend some mental energy trying to erase the memories of the dancers from their consciousness.
Key West, Florida (December 2018)
Our first port of call was Key West and I felt like standing in the middle of Duvall Street and yelling, "We Made It!" That is because my wife and I had been to Key West twenty-five years ago and it was not a good experience. In retrospect, what we should have done was to talk about our expectations before the trip because Tracey was unhappy that I was not able to lighten up and have more fun. I was not happy because I became sun burned on the first day and could not do much outside. Tracey spent a lot of time around the pool while I spent my time in the hotel brooding. The only highlight of the trip for me was to drive the rental car around the island. Relations cooled between us during the flight home and that is why, after thirty years of marriage, I wanted to yell on Duvall Street.
We disembarked next to the Sunset Pier and then walked the length of Key West all the way down to the concrete buoy that marks the southernmost point of the continental United States. Duvall Street has become just one shop after another and they are all aimed at the tourists coming in off of the cruise ships. I found this disappointing and my jeremiad is that the island has lost its charm as an old world place to visit. We saw the Hemingway House, Captain Tony's bar from the famous Jimmy Buffett song, and the Truman Little Whitehouse where the president vacationed. It was a real treat to play Corn Hole right next to where Truman used to grill his steak. The lady in charge of the house said that Truman was forced to use silver tongs to grill with because that was all the Little White House had but he thought that they were too fussy. She also said that Truman would have loved the fact that people were still playing Corn Hole in his back yard seventy years after he lived there.
“Wherever you go, you take yourself with you” is one of my favorite sayings and it applies to Key West because on the way back to the ship I could feel myself becoming tired and cranky. After all, we had been fighting the crowd for about three hours and no one seemed to notice Tracey’s cane. She said that this might be a “lower your head and avoid eye contact” type of situation. I responded with “I am in more of a lock eyeballs and give them a ‘don’t mess with me’ mood.” Eventually I was able to settle down and practice my Zen mantra of “breathe in, breathe out, and move on.” Everything went like clockwork because we were willing to set aside all our expectations and just let the experience happen; to keep it light and loose and to go with the flow. This attitude served us well through the long and hectic days.
Bahamas (December 2018)
Our second port of call was Nassau in the Bahamas and when we disembarked, I was looking for something unique to do. We had previously done a cultural tour and I didn’t want to do that again. When I asked our cab driver if there was anything unique to do in Nassau, he said that the only thing that he could think of was an excursion to swim with pigs. I said that “if I wanted to hang around with a bunch of pigs then I would go to Senior Frogs.” The only outstanding activity left for us to do in Nassau was water sports but everyone had already ridden Jet Skis at the lake, so I bent my own little rule about doing something new, and I am glad that I did. We could hear Lillian laughing and squealing in delights and she sped past us on the water. When it was Grant’s turn to steer he said, “I tried to throw Lillian off but she hung in there like a champ.” The fun for me was watching my children having a good time and I took many pictures. Virginia especially looked good on the Jet Skis because her jaw line looked cut as she was concentrating on the water ride. The day was a complete success because we made many great memories together and there was no fighting or sniping at each other.
Miami, Florida (Miami 2018)
I bought a deluxe bus tour package included a boat tour of the bay of Miami. Unfortunately, there were three ten-year old boys who were not being chaperoned and who were given free reign of the inside of the boat. After they dove under our seats while playing “Hide and Go Seek,” I decided that I should avoid the hellions and go outside to settle myself down. My choice was to either stay in the cabin and let the children and their screaming get to me or change venues. Standing at the front of the boat, I closed my eyes and felt the sun on my face and the wind blowing through my hair as the boat rocked me up and down and from side to side. It turned out to be a relaxing experience and I was only half way paying attention as our tour guide rattled off all of the names of the celebrities who owned homes on the bay.
We disembarked from our boat tour and only had time to make one stop on our tour bus on the first day in Miami, so we stopped at Coconut Grove. We were all feeling a little sea sick and car sick and needed a break from constantly moving. It just so happened that Coconut Grove was holding the “King Mango Strut” parade and, going along with our philosophy or being flexible and open to new things, we decided to stick around to see what it was all about. The parade featured a parody of the red tide that had been plaguing South Florida for so long. Also, several people were dressed as Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the Supreme Court justice who had become popular because of her "RBG" and "On the Basis of Sex" movies. There were a lot of environmentalists and liberals in Coconut Grove and they used the parade to vent their political views. After the parade we boarded the bus and made our way back to South Beach but the traffic across the Bay Bridge was backed up bumper to bumper. Our bus driver, clearly frustrated, said "traffic ain't playing' today!" It was nice to let someone else do the driving while I stayed on top of the double decker bus to sit in the sun and enjoy the spectacular view of Miami that the Bay Bridge gave me.
On the second day of our bus tour we rode to the Wynwood Walls and the Little Havana neighborhood. Wynwood is a Miami neighborhood where artists are encouraged to spray paint their works onto the walls on the garages and storage buildings that make up the neighborhood. We saw some original and thought-provoking works and, since my future son in law is an artist, we took our time drifting from one piece of work to another; there were several pieces in a fenced in compound that was reserved for some seasoned artists. We boarded the bus for our last destination which was Little Havana. For a couple of blocks in either direction from our drop off point, we felt like we were in a different country. All the signs in the local shops were in Spanish and the locals spoke in their native language; many of them were Cubans who had come to America to escape the Castro regime. At the main intersection of Little Havana was a town square where anyone could play dominoes, chess, or checkers for free. The chess and checkers players were sitting quietly while they Dominoes players were yelling and screaming, but I think that they were putting on a show for the tourists who were watching on the sidelines.
South Beach, Florida (December 2018)
We celebrated New Years Eve on South Beach, Miami. Tracey and the kids stayed awake for the fireworks as to bring in the new year in style. Lillian and Tanner snuck into the party that the hotel was having and took a lot of selfies on the beach with the fireworks exploding in the background. Tracey and Grant sat on the front porch of the hotel and people watched as the drunken tourists paraded in front of their stoop.
Just as a tiger cannot change his stripes, I cannot deviate from my schedule, even on New Year’s Eve. I went to bed early so that I could get up to work out before the others had stirred. After lifting weights for an hour, I went for a long run which encompassed the full length of South Beach. At first there were no other runners on the boardwalk but, as I made my way back from the ten-mile loop, I began to pass more and more walkers and runners. As I ran passed the muscle beach, which was full of buff men and women who were having on early morning workout on the first day of the new year, I decided to join them and did a few pull ups and dips on the equipment that the city had installed on the beach. Walking back to the boardwalk, I looked around to see who on earth would be awake at such an early hour on January 1. There were young families pushing strollers to the beach to watch the sun come up. One young man was still in his tuxedo and he was holding hands with his girlfriend and I had the feeling that he was a waiter who had just got off from work. Incongruently, there was a Hasidic Jew reading the Bible on a park bench. And, of course, there were many partiers who had not been able to make it off the beach after the fireworks and had only half way slept off their drunken night. Their walk of shame had just begun as, with stooped shoulders and down cast eyes, they left the beach.
If I could freeze one moment in time from our Miami trip it would be when we went out for dinner at Cantina 27. We were all tired after a long day of walking, and yet there was no sniping at each other and no other drama. After a satisfying, but heavy, Italian dinner, I raised my glass for a toast. “To the Norwegian ‘Sky,’ and Miami, and the Baltic Sea.” The last part of the toast was a nod to the next big adventure that we will share together. Our vacation went so well that I couldn’t wait to do it again, so we are planning a cruise to Berlin, St. Petersburg, Helsinki, Copenhagen, and Oslo.
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