South Florida

I have quite a bit catching up to do on this blog about my travels of the previous week. Considering not too much interesting will be happening in the 'Nati in the next two weeks, I may actually catch up on everything with some interesting tales before I return to Somerville.

Traveling with my family is not what anyone would describe as fun or easy. It's not that I do not love my family or anything along those lines, but when any situation turns stressful, my family turns ugly. After a rather uneventful flight down to West Palm, we encountered the world of strange rental car companies and the awful I-95 Friday afternoon traffic.

Upon landing at West Palm, we headed to the Alamo counter. The agent was absolutely classless in trying to sell us a gas guzzler to fit all of our luggage while our midsize SUV could already easily fit the luggage. It was a bad sales job by the guy, but I would not have been shocked if he had gotten a lot of people to upgrade due to false information. He was likely going to personally pocket the extra money, which he may have needed, but that is no way to make an extra buck.

It gets even worse when we reach the Alamo Center off the airport grounds. We load up the car and are ready to go. However, the car will not start with whatever we try to do. It takes five minutes to find an agent to help us, but even the agent who spoke little English or Spanish could not help us. At least there was another car in the lot that could fit our luggage and actually started up. You can only imagine the tension growing in my family at this point.

If any of you have ever driven 95 South in Palm Beach, Broward, or Miami-Dade counties, you know the road is usually very wide (8 to 14 lanes) yet there are still unexplainable traffic jams. We were cruising until we hit Boca and everything went downhill from there. My family is freaking out in a relatively normal traffic jam, and I am about to lose my mind. We all knew there was going to a be a traffic jam on the way to Davie, but sometimes the physical reality causes more problems. The drive may have taken almost 90 minutes, but in retrospect the delays were not that bad except for my family's reactions.

When in Ft. Lauderdale, check out the newer Himmarshee Village. It is a really hoping area near the Broward Center for the Performing Arts. The area used to be one of the worst in the city, but with the new arts district, the area has become very popular with fine restaurants, bars, and clubs. It provides a nice, smaller, yet just as hoping alternative to Las Olas in Ft. Lauderdale. We ate at the actual Himmarshee restaurant, which was excellent and very filling after an afternoon of travels.

On Saturday, we headed down to the Miami airport to drop the rental car. After a filling breakfast at the Waffle House (I may be the only one, but I actually really like the Waffle House and its employees-maybe my almost Southern side in me?), we started heading down Florida's Turnpike. Passing Dolphins Stadium almost made me cry since I really want to be at this week's FedEx Orange Bowl, but with this trip, it was deemed impossible. I was so close, but I was only there 12 days early. After encountering some more Miami traffic, we reached the airport and had to wait only a few minutes to catch a shuttle to the cruise port.

Boarding the NCL Dawn takes a while since there are a lot of stages, but it took only 45 minutes. Since we had a mini-suite, we could bypass the worst lines, and once we navigated the maze inside the cruise terminal in Miami, we stepped onto Dawn. The next entries will detail the next week aboard the Dawn, which is a great ship and one where people stay on board unlike the tragedy on the Norwegian Pearl.