I’m back in Austin (for a few days anyway) after spending a week or so in South Florida. As mentioned in my previous post, I was in Key West for a wedding of a good friend of mine and since we flew into and out of Fort Lauderdale, we spent some time with my college roommate and her husband. They have become very, very good friends and we all enjoy hanging out with one another. It’s actually been extraordinarily satisfying reconnecting with her because it is really hard for me to make friends.
The weather in South Florida was fairly unusual though. Normally, this time of year gets the everyday afternoon thunderstorm and the rest of the day is sunny and warm. But there’s some weirdness with the weather patterns all over the world and South Florida instead is in the middle of an atmospheric river that is streaming moisture off the Gulf and directly onto Florida. So the upshot is that it is raining far more than normal.
When we arrived on Saturday, we only had some sprinkles to navigate on the way to North Miami. We lucked out that it didn’t rain any more that night since we had dinner reservations at our favorite Miami Italian restaurant, located in the middle of a rapidly revitalizing neighborhood right on the river. (It’s so weird to me to see restaurants and trendy bars and clubs opening up in that neighborhood because when I lived there, you only went there to dump a dead body. Now, it’s one of the many pockets of hipness in the city.) I would give you the name of the restaurant but honestly, it’s getting really hard to get a reservation there anymore and I don’t want to have to compete with y’all for a spot in the dining room 😉
Anyway, Sunday we made the drive to the Keys. Normally, if you take the turnpike and toll roads, you can make it from Lydia’s house to Key West in about 3.5 hours. It deluged on us at one point near Homestead; but other than that, we had a fairly consistent drizzly rain on us for the drive. Regardless, the drive to the Keys always gives me joy, especially when you get those beautiful water views in between keys. We rolled into Key West just about on schedule. And lucky for us, once we got cleaned up and ready to party on Duval Street, the rain stopped. I won’t bore you with the details of our boozy roam up Duval, but suffice to say that we had some fun. Fortunately, we did go back to the hotel at a semi-reasonable time (1am – the bars close at 4am so we went home early actually) because this amazing thunderstorm rolled through around 3:30am with blinding lightning and crashing thunder. I find storms like that to be thrilling, especially when I’m not too worried about my house catching fire from a lightning strike.
Monday, the weather was decent and I was even able to go across the street to the beach to get some beautiful photos of the sunset. I also managed to get bit by pretty much every biting insect within a 40-foot radius of me as well. Entrepreneurs, I have the next big thing for you: make a sunscreen and bug repellent combination that would work on me. I think I literally could dip my legs in DEET and I would still get bit up. The bugs obviously love this sweet blood of mine… (And a week later, I still have itchy welts, WTF?)Â Tuesday, I picked up my friend and her hubby and baby from the airport and then spent most of the day working (boring!), although I did go out to a dinner at a cute little bistro that night.
The wedding was Wednesday and I told y’all in the last post that it was going to be an extremely small wedding: just six of us (plus the bride and groom and their 1 year-old). It was a gorgeous ceremony, right on the beach. My friend Renee was stunning in her wedding dress and her groom was downright adorable, getting choked up as soon as he saw her. They couldn’t stop kissing during the ceremony, leading the minister to joke “not yet” every time and finally giving up. They did this thing where they mixed sand from their individual bottles into an empty glass jar along with some sand from Key West (I sincerely hope they didn’t get any of those freaking biting insects mixed in with that sand). It was lovely. And in the background, you could see this massive storm moving in over the water. While they were taking the official photos, a waterspout formed. I made the prudent decision to head back to the hotel and hadn’t even taken a seat in the bar before the heavens opened up. I have never seen so much rain at once. The lightning and thunder were nearly simultaneous. The bride and groom had just gotten into their car when it started, so fortunately they were able to get their photos done. But since the original plan was to take a ferry over to where dinner was, we ended up calling an audible and going somewhere else that didn’t require being in an aluminum vessel over open water during a hellacious storm. As it was, we had to wade through knee-deep water a few blocks to get there. (Oddly, after we finished dinner and went back outside, all of the water had receded. I mean, all of it was gone with nary a puddle to be seen.) It was definitely the most memorable wedding I have ever been to.
Thursday, we drove back up to North Miami…and got stuck in the slowest traffic. I actually napped in the passenger seat for awhile and I usually never do that. All in all, it took just about 5 hours to make what is normally a 3.5 hour drive. Lydia made lasagna for dinner and I was so grateful not to have to get back into the car that night. The next day, we were going to make a run in their boat to Bimini but the marine forecast looked pretty dicey; so we ended up going back to the Fort Lauderdale marina we went to a few months ago. We managed to get a visit to the beach up there before it rained. But then it rained pretty much for the next 2 days. It was a much more low-key time than previously.
So, all in all, I had a nice time in Florida. I got to spend some time with two really good friends of mine. I got to go to dinner at one of my most favorite restaurants. And I didn’t have to stress too much about getting too much sun. Silver lining to all those clouds, right?