My Caribbean Vacation - Day 2 - Miami Day

 Click here for Day 1

Also,  HERE is my tour of the Carnival Victory

DAY 2 - MIAMI DAY - Sunday, Sept 1, 2013

We were up fairly early, who can sleep in on their first day of vacation??

Of course I ran to the window to see if I missed the sunrise. It was a little cloudy, so it wasn't going to be a gorgeous Miami sunrise. It was still beautiful to me!

Looking straight down, I could now see the giant yacht a little more clearly that was parked below.

The bay view  from this window was just incredible. The buildings in the distance are part of South Beach, where we were planning to go later that day.

Here is a picture of the awesome window in our room. You can see there was plenty of room for all of us to sit in the window, which we did a lot of. I don't think we even turned the TV on.

See the pointy topped building that looks like white tents? The cruise ships pull up to the other side of those buildings. I was getting excited to see my ship come in tomorrow morning!

I had to tear myself away from the window.........

We all showered and dressed and started our morning with a walk around the hotel.

 We started our tour outside, on the roof. We weren't up on the very top of the tall building, we were on a part of the roof beside it that was about 3-4 floors up.
Looking up:

There was a nice walking/jogging track up there.

 And a beautiful pool:

There was a little restaurant and bar by the pool:

And a nice patio area where Lisa and I sat down for a few minutes to wait while Chris and Cody ran back to the room for something.

Palm trees on the roof!!! I love the palm trees, and since we arrived in the dark the night before, these were my first palm trees of the vacation.

Looking out over downtown Miami:

After the kids came back, we headed back inside to do a little more sightseeing.
This is the spa lobby:

We went back down to the main lobby of the hotel:

Cody and I went up to the 2nd floor and found the huge conference rooms.
This was a view of the main lobby from the 2nd floor balcony:

Following Cody back downstairs:

By now it was about 10AM or so, and we were all getting a little hungry. We went back to our rooms to freshen up and get ready to walk to Bayside Marketplace for lunch. Bayside is an outdoor mall with shops, stores, and restaurants. We knew we would find a nice place to eat lunch there.

We walked through Bayside park to get to the outdoor mall. It took less than 10 minutes to walk through the park.

Bayside park is a beautiful park, but there are some homeless people that hang out there. Cody snapped this picture of someone sleeping on one of the benches.

We stopped to take a few pictures

Someone offered to take a picture of all of us, and it came out really good! I think I will frame this one (after I photoshop the cigarette out of my hand!)

 When we got to Bayside, we saw the huge Banyan trees

 We walked around the stores for a few minutes, and looked at the menu's posted outside of all of the restaurants.

We considered eating at the Hard Rock Cafe, one of my favorite stops for lunch:

But we ended up eating at Hooters. The wings were good, and it was a nice lunch with a nice view of Bayside marina.

It was really dark inside the restaurant and I couldn't get a good picture of us. I lightened this one

After lunch we walked around a little more. We walked into some souvenir shops, and the Disney store (I LOVE DISNEY!!!)
I think the only thing I bought that day was a postcard to send home to my Timmy.

This lady was singing and dancing on the outdoor stage at Bayside. She was really good!

 Around 2 PM we headed back toward the hotel.
Ours is the triangle shaped building in the middle of the picture.

Back at the hotel, we regrouped and decided to go to CVS and get some soda's and waters to carry on the ship with us the next day.
We walked down a few blocks and found the CVS

We bought a few 12 packs of Sprite and root beer, and a case of water.

Back at the hotel again, we decided to go for a swim in the pool to cool off a little.
We all changed into our swimsuits and went to the roof pool.
It was a nice afternoon in Miami

Me, Cody and Chris in the pool

We stayed at the pool about an hour and then we had to go back to our rooms to get ready to go to Miami Beach for the evening.
We changed out of our swimsuits and got cleaned up. Around 5 PM we left the hotel to go back to Bayside. When we were there earlier, we saw a Water Taxi that could take us to Bayside and also give us a little tour of the bay area.
We went back to the Water Taxi and paid for a one-way ride to South Beach. We took a seat and waited for the next taxi to leave.
Here are Cody, Lisa and Chris waiting for the water taxi to leave:

We're on the water taxi, heading out to Miami beach

Looking back at the Intercontinental from our water taxi (It's the one right behind the huge yacht):

 After we looked at our pics from the water taxi, we noticed we had been photobombed by the Captain! The guide took 2 pics of us using Lisa's camera. This was one of them!
Thats the Captain of our taxi behind us. We got a good laugh out of that one. We thought we were taking a cute little family picture!

The guide was actually quite good, and quite funny apparently. He told us all about the different things we passed by. It took about 20 minutes to get to Miami beach.

Our first stop was to walk to DASH, the Kardashian's clothing store. Cody and I really wanted to take pics of ourselves outside this store. We didn't expect it to be open on a Sunday evening, but we wanted the outside photo op anyway. We walked several blocks toward the DASH store, and toward the beach and restaurants. It was HOT out!! We stopped to buy bottles of water to drink as we walked. By the time we knew it, we had walked right past the DASH store. It was back about a block and a half  and we missed it!! It was REALLY hot and we had already walked about a mile at that point. I was way too hot and too tired to backtrack through the busy streets. 

We kept going toward the restaurants and the beach. 

We made it to the beach and it was really nice to be away from the hot busy streets. The ocean breeze cooled us off a little as we walked toward the water.

We took off our shoes and waded in the water a little. It was about 6 or 6:30 PM and I was surprised at how crowded Miami beach was on a Sunday evening. Cody and I collected sand and a few shells in baggies we brought with us, and we all walked back toward the restaurants.

We sat on some steps and people watched while we assessed our choices for dinner:

Because it was Labor Day weekend, South Beach was packed. It was really crowded, everywhere we went we had to wade through wall to wall people. Not just people........these were PRETTY people. Miami beach is full of beautiful people, guys and girls alike. It seemed like everyone was out in the streets on this night.

We walked along the main road by the beach, I think it's called Ocean Drive. Lots of really nice cars, people everywhere, loud music, and did I mention a lot of people??

It was actually a bit chaotic for me. I was hot and I was hungry. It's really hard to navagate through crowds when you have no idea where you are going.
We walked for a few short blocks and stopped at a place called the Clevelander. We decided to eat here because they said they had seating inside in the air conditioning.
Not a very good picture, but this is the only one I took inside the Clevelander.

We all felt so much better after we ate and cooled off. When we walked outside the restaurant, we seemed to step right into the middle of a huge outdoor party! 

We happened to walk outside a door that was right by an outdoor stage. The music was really loud, and there were security guys standing near the stage. We froze right by the door and had to take a minute to take the whole scene in. I think we were just surprised at the way we had just stepped into a party. I guess The Clevelander is a pretty popular outdoor club? We had no idea when we stopped for burgers. And don't forget we looked like total tourists standing in the middle of this place with our cameras. 

We noticed a really pretty girl wearing almost nothing. She was talking with a group of people and partying.

My sis was kind of joking when she asked the nearest security guard if the naked lady would take a picture with us. 

Before I knew it, the security guard walked into the crowd and asked her if she would pose for pictures with us. 

I was surprised when she said yes, and came over to us.

Lisa asked Chris to get in the picture and this turned out to be the highlight of Chris's evening!

Look at the look on his face!!! Priceless!

She was so pretty! And so naked!! And she was all up in Chris's business! 

She was very nice too. It was sweet of her to come pose with us like that.

We left the Clevelander and walked a few blocks. 

I had some friends, Amy and Greg, that were in Miami Beach that night too. They had 2 friends with them and they were going on the cruise too, and had just flown into Florida that day. I was in touch with them throughout the day through texts, and we hoped we would see them before we all boarded the ship the next morning.

We realized we were very close to the place they were going to be going for the evening, Mango's. We found Mango's, but we didn't see my friends.

It turned out, the 4 of them showed up at Mango's just a few minutes after we left. Too bad we had just missed them, but we would see them tomorrow on the ship, for sure!!

We walked along the streets for a few blocks and we ended up about a block from DASH. We decided to give it one more try.

This time we found it, and Cody and I got our pictures in front of DASH!!!

(It's so fun to be tourists!)

We walked another block or two, and we all decided we were tired and ready to go back to the hotel. It was around 9 or 9:30 PM by then and we were all wiped out from so much walking and the heat.

We found a taxi to take us back to the hotel, and went back up to our rooms.

Of course, the kids and I couldn't sleep right away, we sat in the window and tried to take more pictures of Miami at night, and they never looked as good as what we were really seeing.

Cody and I went downstairs and outside the hotel to see if we could look up and find our window.

It was about half way up the building. You can see in the pic below that Chris is up there shining a flashlight out at us. I zoomed in with my camera and could barely see his light.
I suppose we could have seen him better if he had turned on all the lights and just waved at us, ha ha.....but we had fun playing with the flashlight anyway. (It's the pink spot in the dark window in the top left of the pic)

I took a few pics of the Intercontinental entryway before Cody and I went back upstairs. This would be my last look at Miami at night.
Although I was REALLY excited (too excited) to board the ship the next morning, I was a little sad that our Miami part of the trip was already over.  Miami is a really beautiful place, at least, the area near the Port of Miami is beautiful.

And here is a video of the girl dancing on the side of the Intercontinental Hotel:

Back up in the room, we all re-packed our suitcases for the ship the next day.

We went to bed that night around midnight, we were all pretty tired.

I enjoyed our Miami day, and I was glad I got to finally go to South Beach. It was really hectic (and hot) there but I'm glad I got to experience it. 

DAY 3 is HERE!