On the Road Again!

 I was reading a blog entry on one of the blogs I follow, "Key West Diary", and the latest post is about crossing the state on US41 -  https://conchscooter.blogspot.com/2021/01/alligator-alley.html It brought a couple of memories of when I did it in 1991 and when Claire and I did it a few years back on route from Punta Gorda to Weston. In December 1991 I was staying with a work colleague and friend, Carole Belcher,  in the south of Miami in Cutler I had the loan of a Kawasaki Z750 twin from her neighbour I only knew as Sgt Steve.  He was in the air force based at Homestead. I had already done a trip to Key West and decided a longer trip to Sarasota to see where my Cavalcade had come from was the next trip.  Remember in 1991 there was no internet. On the Key West trip.... I set off along US41 stopping at various places to check out the Everglades.  One stop was because I saw a large alligator on the opposite side of the water filled ditch.  He...

Today we went to the Flamingo Gardens in nearby Davie.  We have been a couple of times before and it always a good half day checking out the animals and birds. Glade and human friend Animals like Glade. A four year old alligator that came to the gardens after being rescued. Along with many others he was part of an egg theft and kept in a Tupperware and us far too small for his age. Others are generally rescues and brought in by the public. Even the black bear! American Black Bear - rescued Plus the birds the park is named after. They have mostly kept the park for native species. Elvis - large male alligator Close-up of Elvis But there are some imports. Such a peafowl. And then back to the apartment via my usual visit to Walmart for Fruit of the Loom underpants. Sadly Hanes have taken over and no FotL to be seen in briefs!! So bought only one packet of Hanes. End of an era. I watched Tottenham beat Man City in the Champions League semi final. Bah! And Claire had a doze.  Dinner...

A nice old fashioned sort of place. We have room 12 on the back of the site Our neighbours  have the Challenger that you can see part of. Sounded nice when it arrived. Good enough and near where we wanted to be. Plus much cheaper than Key West. Sea Dell Motel A walk down the street show us the sea, but like most places, no access as the coast is privately owned and fenced off.

Time for our trip to the Keys. Off around 9am for the 122 mile drive to Marathon. I had planned waypoints en route a Theater of the Sea and the Dolphin Research Centre. Traffic was horrible in TomTom"s "fastest" no tolls route. I75 and some parkway or other. Did I say no tolls? Despite that being in the route setup we found ourselves on the Don Shula Parkway, a toll road. Hopefully the Sunpass in the window will have been picked up and Dollar will pass on any tolls. Once we finally got to Homestead and onto US1 we felt about better. A stop at a BK for coffee and we were down to Key Largo and the Keys. We passed the Sea Dell motel and as we were too early we went for lunch.  Barracuda restaurant. Great plate of shrimp and fries. With it still too early we went back up to Grassy Key and the Dolphin Research Center. Superb demos is dolphins in action. So many more noises than you saw on "Flipper". Older readers may remember the TV serues. We spent nearly three hou...

Apartment sorted. We were rather longer than half an hour and we are in a smaller resort called Flamingo One down the road. We are second floor overlooking a small lake. You can just see it through the trees. This actually better than the main site as it is very crowded and in a more quiet area away from the freeway. View from Balcony Once the cases were lugged up we were out again to a Publix. Sadly no beer for gout foot Devall.  And another salad. . Salad from Publix And tomorrow's adventure? Maybe stay locally. We will be due our "usual" visit to the Flamingo Gardens -  https://www.flamingogardens.org  - and it is only a few blocks away. Monday we are off to the Keys.

Up early. Only one bagel today. Cutting down... Packed and car loaded. Dishwasher on and we were checked out of the Vistana and on the way.  Last pic before leaving. Even though the Sonic is a small budget car the boot takes two large cases! The 192 to I95. Gas stop filled up with $15. This time the right side of the pump... Same shitty budget conscious pipe. Stopped at a Target and picked up some supplies. The idea to get to the sea and have lunch. Got to Deerfield Beach. A quarter per five minutes to park and I had only four on me. Machine "green" button effed so couldn't even spend my dollar. Back to I95 and I595 to Weston. Found check-in. No apartment allocated. Very unusual. Will definitely mention that to RCI. Receptionist did all the paperwork and asked us to wait for a room to be cleaned and added to the computer!! So here we are in Weston Town Center having a coffee. Back soon...

With everything sorted all we can hope for is good health (!) and of course the usual rate checking to get the most number of the mighty US dollars for our weakened pound sterling. Currently the tourist rate is shave under $1.29 and I have ordered around £250 worth. Collect Saturday. The dollars are usually nice and new when I get them.  I immediately fold them into my foreign currency wallet and that newness is gone. We generally use the Halifax Bank Clarity credit card when we are away as it is one of the few UK MasterCard offering from the banks that has no added charges for using it outside the UK.  These can mount up. We have used it before in the US and last year in Norway and France. My day to day MasterCard from Tesco Bank earns points for using it and any purchase at their stores.  The points are useful as you can spend them to "buy" things, like ferry and Eurotunnel crossings. But they charge a transaction charge plus a commission (currently 2.5%)  every ti...

I have been looking at places to go when we are in Orlando and Weston.  Neither of us are great theme park lovers so Orlando might not be the greatest choice for us to vacation! But, there are other things. We go for the R&R and the weather.  Early April at home will be showery and maybe around 12°C and the projected temps are 27°C in Florida.  Unlike last time when we went in the wake of the hurricanes and it was wert a lot of the time. I have been busy looking at non-theme park things to do and mapping them in MyRouteApp.  I have the US maps as well as Europe in the TomTom and that will go with me as hand luggage. So far I have a few botanical gardens and of course Gatorland mapped and primed.  Once there we can se what else we want to see/do. From Weston we have some old favourites to check out plus a trip to the Keys for an overnight.  Hotels are arm and leg expensive but we have one with good reviews in Marathon.  Only 15 days from now we will...

So that's it.  Twenty-three days to go.  The car-hire fully paid up now after a few hiccups with the automatic (or not!) collection from Rentalcars. What's next?  I have a love hate relationship with Walmart.  But, they do have decent Fruit of the Loom underwear that we can't get over here in the UK. And other stuff by Wrangler that is also unobtanium here. So packing?  We always over pack.  Maybe this year take less and bring less home unused.

Going back through some holiday photos from trips to the US and Florida I came across this photo. I love this statue. It's in Sarasota by the harbour. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconditional_Surrender_(sculpture)

Another email from Aer Lingus confirming our flights.  As they didn't say that anything had changed I had a quick look against the previous email to see and there's nothing changed. The re-timing of the Dublin to Miami flight in December might actually be a benefit as the US Immigration is done in Dublin and a bit longer might aid getting through there and maybe be a boon in Miami.  There are scare stories about Miami and the massive queues of foreigners trying to get in, whether with ESTA or Visa. On the car-hire front I cancelled the National booking and have a new one with Dollar at a lower rate for an "intermediate" car.  The example is a Nissan Sentra. I don't tend to look at Nissan at home or away and so have little idea what one looks like.  I Googled it and this is a  Sentra .

I had a look on booking.com after I had planned a few trips out from when we are in Weston FL.  We do like to have a trip down to the Keys, but to go to Key West needs more time and also hotels are in the "sell a kidney" bracket.  Last time we went they weren't too bad. So I had a look along the Keys and booked at Marathon Key. Reasonable price and 8/10 star review, plus it has free cancellation and nothing to pay upfront.   So the plan is we can call in at the  Dolphin Research Centre  or  Theater of the Seas  on the way down as they are nearer the mainland.  We can decide that later. I stopped at the  Theater of the Seas  way back in 1991 when I was "doing" Florida on a Kawasaki Z750 factory custom twin.  I have a picture that I can look out where I was sadly cuddling a sealion!   So another bit of planning coming together as hotels starts to release their dates and room rates to the booking sites.

So here we are in the new year. It's 2019 and I have a small list of things that I need to get sorted as soon as possible. The hotel in Miami for the first night is booked and that was done ages ago. I like to check on booking.com or indeed Trivago to see if any  more come online that offer the same ratings for a better price.  None so far! When we are in Weston for the second week, I have been looking at places to go.  Weston isn't the most exciting place!  We both like the Keys but even in April the hotels are pretty expensive. I guess the northerners are all still there escaping from the cold in the northern states? So that's something to look at again over the next three months. Car-hire. Always on the update list.  The rental prices seem to ebb and flo like the weather.  One day expensive, next not. I found clearing cookies from the laptop or desktop seems to alter things too. Travel insurance is still to look at. I am sure I still have the current Wor...

Going through the motions of checking to see what the rates are.  For some reason National who I have been using for years appear to have hiked their rates up and for the "full size" bracket the quote is about 50% higher than last October (2017) Will look later. I prefer the idea of booking and not paying until I am face to face with the counter clerk! But too many are pay now.

I had an email from Aer Lingus.  They have re-timed the outward flight to Miami from Dublin.  It is now an hour later. It shouldn't affect the car hire or the overnight hotel by very much.

When booking apartments with RCI there is a gamble.  Or it is a gamble.  When you login there might be plenty of choices or there might be few.... either way you have to decide whether to take one that is there, or wait a bit to see if any come online. When I booked Weston a few weeks ago for week 2,  I of course looked at week 1 as well. There were a few resorts in the Orlando/Kissimmee area that were in the yes column, and quite a few in the maybe and a few in the no column. With 23 points left to spend there was plenty of scope but today I logged in and there is a sale on rci.com .  By sale they mean that some resorts are down a few points in price. Although the total number of available resorts hadn't gone up, it had brought some places that were above our points level into play. For it to have evened up a bit, I guess there were resorts we could afford that had been booked and no longer had vacancies. Where we stayed before at Silver Lake has a few points knocke...

With the second week of the trip ending with the Easter holiday; our flight home is Good Friday, everything ramps up price wise and with RCI, points wise also. What might be 13 to 15 RCI points the week before becomes 23 to 25 or more with exchanges starting 13th April. So I have booked the apartment in Weston near Fort Lauderdale for the second week. We have stayed in a different resort there before. Weston isn't on the beach or the Gulf and I find it difficult to see why it was built at all. The centre is laid out in the usual block system but has curved/circular roads..... like a spider web in places.  There's not a lot there but it should be plenty relaxing. Plus of course this is a "short week" for us as we have to leave on the Friday to get to the airport rather than the Saturday. It also means we aren't licke dput at 10am and have 8 hours to find something to do to fill the time. That leaves 23 RCI points to spend on another week elsewhere. It looks like a ...

This is a right bloody palaver. A troll through the internet and National has resulted in a reservation for a full size at MIA. It's damned expensive.  I had a look on TripAdvisor to look for recommendations and have a few other ideas to follow up on. I have had a look at a few of the comparison sites and there are cheaper offers. With National, they include most of the the insurances and I have never paid for anything on top so need to check the cheaper companies to see what level of cover there is. On one of the TA pages someone was saying they have third-party insurance that covers any excess that they would have to pay on the rental in the event of an accident.  I will look at that as well.   As for the Timeshare. Looking at Orlando area for week 1 and week 2 nearer Miami. It's still seven months away so hopefully a few more resorts will pop up.

Now that flights have been booked and we are committed it's time to look for somewhere to stay on the first night. As usual I went to booking.com for answers and found a Motel 6 with free cancellation and no advanced payment. The reviews give it 7.4/10. It looks from blurb that many hotels like to take a deposit or even the full amount immediately on reserving a room, even if there's free cancellation. We had this before at the Blue Marlin in Key West where we stayed two nights and were about $300 out of pocket five months before going. It wasn't so bad as we still went. I know a lot of hoteliers don't like the free cancellations part of the system but to me it gives flexibility to the customer. If you're honest and give good service, then people will still stay with you. Car hire seems to have hiked a bit since October 2017 when we last busied ourselves over. Currently checking the booking sites to see what deal there are. With the chances of the timeshare being...

So. The question of how to use the 36 RCI points I have banked was coming down to two periods of time. From UK to the US it is really not good value to spend 9 hours plus flying for one week away. So it needs to be when there are two weeks or more to fit into. Easter and Summer holidays. Surprisingly July/August was best for the timeshare exchanges in the more westerly states; Arizona etc. But from reading Roger Naylor's articles for Arizona magazines it's monsoon time. After last year in Florida following the hurricanes, no thanks!!!  But airfares to Phoenix or Last Vegas are for the rich only. So my attention was shifted to Easter. Schools break up on April 5th and return the day after Easter Monday. And since our management dictated our holidays could only be in school holidays I booked that fortnight off ages ago. Now the problem was looking for flights. We went into the Thomas Cook agency in Hythe. Got some ideas. Then used Skyscanner.  London Heathrow to Miami, on April...