Miami and Miami Beach
We slept in. I think it was 10:30am by the time I got up, and it was after 11:30am by the time Leanne crawled out of bed. We blame the 3 hour time difference between Miami and Los Angeles.
Eventually we got down to the lobby and had a muffin, bagel and some hot chocolates for breakfast (?? it was after 12:30pm by this time !), and then wandered off to walk around downtown Miami. We headed for the waterfront, and walked along until we found the Marketplace, with lots of shops and many restaurants and bars – this looks like the place to go for dinner some night !
We walked back towards the hotel, but then crossed over the Miami river and down into the financial district, looking for a visitors information bureau that our map said was down there, but we could not find it.
After getting back to our room to gather some more of our things, we retrieved the car from the parking garage and drove out to Miami Beach to have a look around there. Eventually we found a park (would hate to think what it would be like in the evening !), and then walked along the beach, admiring the Atlantic Ocean for the first time, then wandered along Ocean Blvd for a bit, looking at the Art Deco buildings. We stopped at a burger bar for a bite to eat, before heading back to the car.
We drove up along the coast towards Ft. Lauderdale and eventually made our way back to the Hertz facility near the airport. Earlier in the day, I had rung Hertz and explained that we wanted to swap our car, and they said that if we came back in the evening, they should be getting a lot of their cars back as people headed home after the long weekend. We checked with the customer service people there, and they looked around for us, but they simply had nothing on the yard that had Neverlost – they explained that we could either have just about any car we wanted without neverlost, or we could keep the Town Car with our Neverlost. I asked if Hertz at Miami Airport would have more choice – he suggested it might, and so since we were driving past the airport on our way back to Miami we decided to give it a go.
We headed back down the I-95 and found our way to the Hertz facility at Miami Airport, where the customer service guy there searched high and low, and eventually found us a Camry with Neverlost – exactly what we were looking for. After a brief scare where I thought I had left my wallet back at Ft. Lauderdale (it was actually under the seat in the Town Car), we drove back to the hotel in Miami, very satisfied and much more comfortable in the familiar Camry. Leanne did complain a little about the lack of heated seats she had discovered in the Town Car, but since it was her complaining about the size of the Town Car, she did consider it something we could probably live without (although it would have come in very handy back at the Grand Canyon last week !!).
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