Tuesday, September 05, 2017

Welcome to Miami

We had a great family trip to Miami.  While the highlight was a new niece, we had some other adventures as well.

Dive trip with Deco Divers - I booked a two tank dive excursion with Grove Scuba.  They were really easy to work with and had descent rental gear.  I picked up a BCD, fins, weights and 2 tanks and headed to the marina to meet the boat.  There were 12 divers and I was fortunate to buddy up with a diver with a similar experience level.  Our first stop was Nautilus.  This was a man made structure meant to resemble the lost city of Atlantis.  It is financed by doubling as a cemetery and the departed can have a plaque put up with remains to show their love of the ocean.  After a surface interval, we headed to RJ's reef which is another pretty cool dive site, but trickier to navigate.  I took a couple of Dramamine and experienced no seasickness on the boat.

Frost Museum of Science - This is a new attraction in Miami.  Despite only being open for a few months, they had some really cool exhibits.  The highlight was the three story aquarium that you could look down on, be on level with and look up on from the lowest level.  It was stocked with rays, a hammerhead shark and other fish.  They also had nice exhibits on simple machines and health.

South Beach - The girls wanted to do a day splashing in the waves and the most convenient beach was South Beach.  Fortunately mid afternoon was a pretty low key time without all of the debauchery the area is known for.  The water was very clear and we got lucky with parking.  On the way out we did stop off for some extremely overpriced drinks including a virgin frozen pina colada, virgin frozen strawberry daiquiri and a mojito.

Our new niece was the calmest baby I have ever been around.  She ate, slept and hung out despite the chaos of another family entering their home.

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