Yesterday was a shorter travel day than I have been averaging. The distance from Okeechobee to my hotel in South Miami was only about 125 miles. That gave me a little time to look do a few other things. One of these was a shopping trip looking for tee shirts to wear in the hotel gyms. I thought that would be a simple thing to purchase given the large number of malls. However, while I got to see the inside of quite a few large stores, I wasn’t able to find tee shirts that fit “normal” sized people (I mean my size). I found plenty for tiny people (up to XX), but none for me. I’ll keep looking.
The trip was pretty because for a lot of it the road skirted Lake Okeechobee along the “moot” surrounding the levee. I realize that the moot is the hole created to get the dirt to pile up for the levee. It is a long “borrow pit.” At one point I managed to get up onto the levee to get a view of the lake, and was surprised to see a vast, open water, lake. It was not full of brush and trees as was the case on the northern part of the lake that I had seen previously. I have to retract my comments that I made yesterday. It all depends upon your vantage point when observing the lake. However, from what I have read, it is a very shallow lake.
The weather report called for strong winds, heavy rain and flooding. That was true, sometimes and at some places. There were many large, dark clouds filling the sky and obvious rainstorms popping up in small areas. I drove through several of these, lasting for perhaps ten minutes and then I would be out in the sun again. The region wasn’t raining, just spots that moved around with the clouds. One of the problems that I encountered was that the windshield wipers didn’t wipe the glass clear, they left what appeared to be an oily residue. It wasn’t bad enough to hamper driving, but it was a bit irritating. I don’t know if that is a build up of road gunge after driving over 5,000 miles, or something local. I hoped that the rain would wash it off, but that didn’t happen.
Having not much else to do, I spent a lot of the drive watching the clouds – noticing a couple of things that I hadn’t seen before. One was a common condition where the clouds actually had dark lines defining their edges.
A couple of days ago I had been playing around with attempting to sketch clouds and came to the realization that they need to be sketched “backwards.” I can’t sketch white, so in order to get white I need to make the other parts dark. Darkening the sky is the only way to make the clouds white. For well defined clouds such as the background cumulus clouds in the photo, there is no “line” separating the white of the clouds from the dark of the sky – the two colors just bump up against each other. I convinced myself that is what happens within the clouds also, it is all about shading, there is no “drawing” of lines. However, yesterday I noticed that there actually are “lines” in the clouds. The clouds in the upper part of the photograph have actual dark lines surrounding the puffs of clouds, it is not all just shading – parts of it can be drawn. Of course the drawn lines are slightly fuzzy, not sharp edged – but lines nevertheless. That is a bit of a relief to me because it is much easier to outline the clouds with a line and shade inside than to just use shading to indicate the edges.
The second thing I noticed was the appearance of orange clouds. Being somewhat color blind I am not positive that orange is the right color, they might have been green, or even brown – but they definitely had a color, not just white and grey. The colored clouds were shaped line the regular cumulus clouds, seemingly behind them off in at a distance. I have no idea what was causing that effect, but it was striking and persistent. I tried to take a photo of them but I was on the freeway without any way to stop to take a photo. I snapped one out of the window, but it wasn’t very useful. Perhaps it was something to do with my dark glasses, I didn’t think to take them off to check on that – because I forgot that I was wearing them.
The hotel web site gave the address as being in Kendall. However, my GPS didn’t offer Kendall as an option. Not only that, but my map of Florida doesn’t have enough resolution to be useful as a street map. It is fine for the State, but not so great within towns. Not knowing a solution I just set my GPS on “South Miami” knowing that is in the general vicinity of Kendall, hoping that I could figure out the rest when I got there. I drove into town on wide, four lane road – heading toward the beach because I knew that Kendall is near the shore and south of South Miami. I figured I would at least bump into the correct town, and since I had the street address would eventually find my destination. However, while sitting at a stop light I noticed the top of a hotel peaking over the top of a large department store – I could see the hotel logo and it was MY hotel, right there waiting for me. What luck!! I haven’t been able to find any sign of a town called Kendall, but the street I drove in on is called Kendall Avenue when it gets closer to the ocean.
The hotel and room in South Miami is FAR better than what I have been staying in lately. Everything is nice and clean, the furniture isn’t banged up and chipped, the paint is nice, and there are no stains in the carpets. Not only that, but the lobby is open and comfortable, very inviting. Even the pool is better. For one thing it has water in it which was rare on my trip, but there is shade and some landscaping in the pool area – it isn’t just a bucket of water surrounded by bare concrete. The price is the same, but the feeling couldn’t be different. I don’t even hear any hammer drills or sledge hammers being used in the surrounding rooms as I did at my last hotel.
Since the drive was so short, I had time to go exploring before dinner time. The ocean is located due east from my hotel, and the main drag was headed east so it seemed like I should be able to just drive a few miles and see the ocean. That was a mistake. It turned out my hotel is about seven miles west of the ocean, I thought was a mile or so. However, the road almost got that far before degenerating into a neighborhood road rather than a main drag. I went as far east as I could, finding a N-S road paralleling the coast. However, I was never able to find the coast because the is a solid line of mansions between the road and the water, most of which had big iron gates with guards. Many of these “houses” were bigger than the hotels that I have been staying at, perhaps averaging 20,000 sq feet or so – some tiny 5,000 square foot homes, but most much larger, grander and expensive.
The architecture that I could see through the surrounding vegetation was uniformly outlandish, reaching across the spectrum of grand old colonial styles to modern art forms. There was so much wealth surrounding these streets that I actually found myself getting sick to my stomach realizing just how be the gap is better the “well to do” and the wealthy, and how many people have acquired vast amounts of the nation’s wealth. It was just sickening, literally.
I had been traveling north along the coast and finally reached Miami. The architecture that I saw there was equally as wild, but a lot was much older. Quite spectacular, what with the curved lines, bold colors and just plain interesting shapes. Even the sky scraper are crazy, doing things like twisting like corkscrews as they reach for the sky. The streets were filled with cars and the sidewalks filled with pedestrians. It all looked interesting, and perhaps even a little exciting. I attempted to find parking so I could join the pedestrians, but none was to be found. I saw a sign offering parking spaces for $20, but I didn’t feel like doing that for the hour or so that I wanted to spend. I finally arrived at a marina where the boats mirrored the wealth of the homes. Of course there was no parking there either, and no beach.
Running out of time, energy and interest I returned to my hotel having failed in my search for a beach. Perhaps I’ll try again on my way up the coast from the Florida Keys. Miami appears to be one of those places that you just have to immerse yourself in, on foot, for a few days. I heard on the news that today is the last day of the city providing tram service. Up until today they have offered free tram based transportation, but that is no longer going to be the case. It is now going to be Uber based, using normal cars. I wonder how that is going to work out.
This morning I will start down the long bridge to the keys.