Best Trip Ever

I went to Miami in the spring and it was the worst trip ever because of the traffic, the tolls, the lodging, the parking and the new ballpark's location.  It was also the best trip ever.  (Below:  Fireworks explode over the Marlins Stadium on my second night.  The Marlins beat the Mets!)

When I couldn't check into my hotel upon my early afternoon arrival downtown from the airport, because the hotel didn't have parking, valet service or even a traffic circle in front and I didn't want to pay the $6 minimum street meter amount (for two hours parking, there's no such thing as a 15 minute errand in downtown Miami), I needed something to do for a few hours before I went to the Florida Marlins new baseball park to see the game that evening.  That was the purpose of my trip, to see a major league baseball game at my 44th different stadium, leaving only one extant stadium to go (new Yankees Stadium).  (Below:  Inside the gaudy new Marlins stadium.  The splashy colors inside belie the desolation of the neighborhoods outside.)

I headed for The River Bar & Seafood Restaurant and enjoyed happy hour there.  For a $19 tab I had several draft beers, three oysters on the half shell served with condiments on a bed of ice, crackers, interesting conversations and was offered several different opinions on the best way to drive to the ballpark from there.  Check out the picture of me enjoying myself, below.

Going to the ballpark, I found free parking by driving a couple of blocks into the surrounding neighborhood four blocks east of the stadium.  Despite the mean look of the streets I walked down to get to the park, free is good and my car was undisturbed when I got back to it around 11 pm.  (Below:  The fare outside the ball park was just as tasty as the fare inside, and a lot cheaper too.  The first night I bought a Cuban Sandwich and a beer for $16 inside; the second night I bought a jumbo loaded hot dog and a soda for $4 outside.)

Inside the ballpark I tried indigenous fare by ordering a Cuban Sandwhich for $7.  Although it wasn't exactly authentic in that it didn't have toasted bread for its outside, it took awhile to prepare (which was a good thing), its various cold cuts inside it were plentiful and tasty and I enjoyed it.  The accompanying $9 Heineken draft in a plastic cup not so much, or at all, asw it was flat warm and not filled to the top.  (Below:  Remember the Charlie Brown refrain that there's nothing better than a hot dog with a baseball game behind it?  There's nothing better than a Cuban Sandwhich with a Marlins game behind it, not even the tepid flat beer in a plastic cup for $9 could spoil that.)

I drove to Key West the next day to fulfill a longstanding goal of going to the southern most tip of the continental U.S.  The long drive down the Keys was fun (I sailed around the Keys for a week in 2009), I enjoyed walking around Key West, and I saw a double rainbow going into the sea on the way back.  (Below:  Every bit of the U.S. is in front of me in this picture.)

And I had a wonderful adventure my second night at the ballpark.  First I purchased my dinner from a vendor outside after the game and I got a fat and delicious kosher half-smoke for $3 which I ate while enjoying the postgame fireworks show.  Then I stopped in a Spanish bar and pool hall for a beer four blocks from the stadium as I walked bacfk to get my car which was two blocks further.  The bar maids were beautiful, no one spoke English, none of the tough looking young men playing pool looked at me even once and I well imagined that I was the first baseball patron they had seen in there since the stadium opened a year earlier.  But I eventually made the bar maid understand that I wanted a Corona ("Una servica, por favor."  "Que?"  "Como se dice Corona in Espanol?"  "Que?").  She finally brought me a cold Corona in a bottle for $3 and I enjoyed sucking it down while I took in the ambience of the Spanish pool hall.  When I was done I figured it was time to go and I left, but happily.  No one followed me as I returned to my car and I drove to the hotel one last time, happy about my excellent trip to Miami.  (Below:  I flew home the next morning and the plane went right over my running venues along the Potomac River as we landed.  That's Rosslyn in Arlington on the right.)

The worst trip ever.

A month ago I traveled to Miami for pleasure and it was the worst trip ever.  The parking, the traffic, the tolls, the Internet hotel and the location of the new ballpark all combined to generate a rancid aftertaste.  (Below:  The purpose of my trip was to attend a major league baseball game at the new Marlins Stadium, built upon the site of the razed Orange Bowl in the heart of Little Havana.)

Parking:  The downtown hotel I stayed at had no parking and the staff referred me to metered street parking.  The parking hours were in effect from 7 am to 2 am.  Really.  There was a three hour limit to the meters with a two hour minimum at three dollars an hour.  Really.  It was kiosk parking, I put funds into a central dispenser and it issued me a ticket with an expiration time for me to place on my dash.  I couldn't check into the hotel initially because I am too cheap to pay $6 parking to check in (two hour minimum).  When I returned to the hotel that night at 11:30 pm I improperly calculated the last 30 minutes of parking, from 1:30 to 2 am, and my ticket came out expiring at 1:47 am.  This left me with 13 minutes of expired parking shortly before 2 am, risking a ticket.  At that point, since I wasn't able to just add another quarter, I could start all over and pay the same $7 I'd just paid and add an additional four bits to get a new ticket that expired, hopefully shortly after 2 am.  Or I could return at 12 midnight and pay $6 (the two hour minimum) and get a new display tab that would expire at 2 am.  These  meterss are everywhere downtown Miami, and Miami can go to hell.  (Below:  There's no traffic circle where you can pull in to check in at the hotel I stayed at in Miami.)

The traffic:  When I returned to my hotel at 11:47 pm. a Miami Heat basketball playoff game had just let out at the nearby arena.  My public parking was in a long narrow lot between the northbound and southbound lanes of Route 1, a half block from my hotel. I chose that lot rather than parking on the streets amidst rows and rows of homeless people stretching out on the sidewalks watching your every move as you lugged your suitcase out of the trunk.  The trouble was, to accelerate the egress of the basketball patrons, they had turned off the cross signals on Route 1 so the signal lights flashed yellow for northbound and southbound cars and red for eastbound and westbound traffic.  Like me.  After watching southbound traffic zoom by uninterruptedly for ten minutes as the nearby Heat parking garage emptied out postgame, I took my life in my hands and ran, luggage and all, across the busy four lanes to the other side of the roadway.  It was harrowing.  Really.  Go to hell, Miami.  (Below:  Thus is the street I had to run across to get to my hotel, the small stone building behind the gleaming metal building.  Notice how the elevated tracks go right by the fourth story windows of it?  My room was on the fourth floor.)

The tolls:  This is a tale about a cashless society.  At the rental car counter they started in.  For $8 a day I could rent a transponder that would enable me to travel "free" on the toll roads in south Florida.  This included the road from the airport to downtown.  Otherwise, the roads didn't take cash or credit cards and if I didn't have the unique "Sunshine Pass" (EZ Pass doesn't work in Florida), the system would snap a picture of my license plate and later mail me a bill for the toll plus a $35 administrative fee for each trip.  My choices were to be extorted $8 a day by the rental car companies, buy a Sunshine Pass for two days, be extorted by the state for scores of dollars if I ventured on the throughways or be consigned to secondary roads where I would probably be lost in horrible traffic on roads that had non-synchronized signal lights at every intersection.  Which is exactly what happened to me the second day when it took me an hour to travel twenty miles on Route 1 south of Miami while a twenty minute ride beckoned me from the nearby elevated I-95.  I couldn't believe a tourism state had adopted this money-grubbing set-up.  (Below:  I had visions of a carefree two days in southern Florida when I arranged for the trip before I discovered that the traffic, parking, Internet hotel, tolls and location of the new baseball park would all become an incredible hassle.)

The Internet hotel:  Don't stay here.  It wasn't an adventure.  It was a hovel, in my opinion.  I purchased a two night stay in this downtown "quality"hotel on an Internet site that gave me a good price, $75 a night non-refundable, but told me nothing about the hotel beforehand, not even the name.  I had to trust them and make the purchase to get the "deal."  After making the purchase and being given the details, I found out the hotel didn't have parking.  Park on the street they said when I called to inquire.  (See above, Parking.)  This turned out to be a real problem (the parking meters were in effect from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m.).  The streets around the hotel were filled with homeless people.  I was on the fourth floor and the hotel was serviced by a single manned elevator that was antidiluvian.  It was more of a bother to locate the operator, who was usually outside smoking, than to take the stairs.  The service was slow.  It took me a half-hour to check in at 11:30 at night, even with a guaranteed reservation.  The hotel was noisy and the rooms were spartan.  The window coverings were vertically hanging thin plastic strips that didn't quite extend across the entire window.  Some part of the window was always uncovered.  Running by just outside my window, twenty feet away, were the elevated rails for the people-mover two car train that Miami uses for its downtown toy transportation loop (it's free).  When I rode that train the next morning after I fed my parking meter at 7 a.m., the train went by my room and I could look right in.  (Below:  Chilling away from my hotel at the Seven-Mile Bridge on the Keys.)

The new ballpark:  Meet the new ballpark.  Same as the old ballpark.  The Orange Bowl was a venerable football stadium in Miami that was in a bad part of town.  It was razed in 2008, and the Marlins new retractable-roof stadium was built on its site and opened last year, for a cost of $634 million, of which 80% was public money.  It's in the heart of residential Little Havana, which is not your typical baseball venue.  I'm pretty sure the scanty baseball crowds drive in, park on site, and drive away after the game.  I studied the maps before I went and was determined to find free (non-restricted residential) parking within walking distance, which could be anywhere within two miles.  Turns out that that type of parking starts within four blocks of the stadium, but it's not a situation where you want to leave your car in, or return alone after dark to it.  Both nights I attended a game at the new stadium I parked four to six blocks east, wherever I could find a spot on the curb amidst the low apartment buildings or bungalow houses lining the streets where people weren't hanging out on the sidewalk or watching the street below from their balconies or porches.  I was an obvious interloper, a freeloading baseball fan come into their neighborhood to park in front of their house, wearing blue jeans and a shirt whereas practically everyone else was wearing low-hanging jeans or shorts exposing plenty of their undershorts and t-shirts, mostly of the tank-top style.  The walk back to the car at 11:30 pm was much more exciting than the six block walk down litter-strewn streets and past abandoned buildings with broken windows five hours earlier in the daylight.  I wanted to get a feel for the neighborhoods surrounding the park and boy, did I.  I did not belong there and I was very wary of quickly getting in a situation way out of my control.  (Below:  The view of downtown Miami from the new Marlins baseball stadium, built on the footprint of the old Orange Bowl.  There are some mean streets between here and there.)

Delight, Detroit, and DeCelle

I have been traveling. I went to Universal’s Islands of Adventure in Orlando late last month. It was a lot of fun. The Spiderman ride was super, with stunning visual images and very modern 3-D images that come right into your cart. Spidey perches right beside you at one point, and they even sprinkle a little water on you, waft some odors past your nose, and blast air past you at opportunistic and appropriate moments. ( Right: I'm guessing that Wolverine is a Universal franchise.)

Then I went to Detroit, where I took a leisurely early morning run along the waterfront by the Joe Louis Arena. I was saddened to see numerous sleeping homeless persons along the outside corridors under the structure. The Decider’s economic blight has staggered Michigan. The people I met in Detroit were super though.

Since the partial stands behind home plate at old abandoned Tiger Stadium, the only part of the venerable structure still standing, were due to be fully demolished within the week, I took a taxi there from my hotel to see it.

The taxi driver acted as a tour guide for me. A tool-and-die operator in the automotive industry for twenty years with six kids, he was laid off this year. He groaned when I climbed into his cab outside my hotel after asking how far away the stadium was. It was only a short ways down Michigan Avenue from there.

"A four dollar fare, man. I was at the head of the taxi line for the next guest going to the airport for $45."

It was rotten luck for him. He had six kids to support. I started to climb out.

"No, no," he insisted, all traces of his bitterness instantly dispelled. "You’re a guest to Detroit. We treat you right!" He meant it too.

He slowly drove me around the ball park on the encircling streets while I craned my neck and watched spectral images flit across the open field and heard roaring crowds from decades past. We looked for a place in the anchor fence surrounding the field where I could slip inside to wander the confines where the ghost of Mickey Cochrane and the athletic Al Kaline and Kirk Gibson restlessly roam.

Regrettably, there was no break in the fence. My thoughts of climbing the eight foot tall barrier were stymied by a security guard’s car idling inside. (Left: My taxi driver points to where Alan Trammel went to work every day on his way to a Hall of Fame career. This taxi driver is a hero, an ambassador for his town while doing what he has to do to provide for his family. I love these great everyday Americans.)

He drove me around the old abandoned train station with its thousand broken windows. It stood tall, hulking and deserted, another symbol signifying that Detroit’s industrial dominance had passed. (Right: Once this structure held sway worldwide. Chevys were shipped from here.)

I gave him $20 for the twenty-minute tour and hoped it was enough for him losing his place in the hotel taxi line. He just smiled inscrutably and warmly wished me well.

Meanwhile, I was trying to get ready for leg two of the DeCelle Memorial Lake Tahoe Relay in Nevada. Have you ever run a seriously hilly four-mile race at high altitude that leads you directly into a monster four-mile hill climb? I never had either, until Saturday.