miami

Oh life. I tell ya. I had planned to post this on Monday but I forgot it was Memorial Day so I spent a good portion of the day in the kitchen making some bbq-accompanying sides. Then it was relax time. Both Tuesday and Wednesday (the hottest days of May EVER) I spent in second and third grade classrooms getting my last few observation hours in. I'm taking a summer semester class so I was still required to do 20 hours of classroom observation, despite the fact that everyone is pretty much reviewing for exams, cleaning up, having tons of days off, etc. But we did get out early yesterday for the heat. That was good considering there is no AC whatsoever in that school.

Anywho, with all that, catching up on 6 small papers, and attending my own classes, that left little room for blogging. So here I am, sharing some vacation photos from Miami, trying to get back on track.

I picked out my favorites to leave big and grouped together some small ones because I know it can be boring looking at other people's vacation photos. I'll probably upload the full size ones to my Flickr at some point so if you guys are into celebrity mansions and view-from-a-boat pictures you can check em out without me bombarding you on here. ;)

Here are a few from the hotel room. We stayed at the Fountainebleau which was amazing. They have such a great selection of restaurants. I was stuffed every night from the most amazing food ever. The beach was great of course, as I am a beach girl at heart, despite the fact that I hide under umbrellas coated in spf 75 these days. :)

Loving that warm, teal water.

The only hitch was that it was Urban Weekend or Week or something. Which meant Lil Wayne and Drake were performing at the clubs in the hotel. Which sounds all good and fine until the clientele changes from scarce resort goers, to a more spring break like bunch that crowds every bar, beach chair, and pool side area, and has raging parties in the hotel room next door to yours until 4am. *insert death stare here* But if you can put all that behind you, it was still an amazing vacation. You just had to make the best of it.

So we went on a tour!

We stopped in Little Havana which was beautiful. The houses were so colorful and this little gift shop (above) had this Cuban coffee that was better than any coffee I have ever tasted. We were taken there specifically to try the coffee. Now that's my kinda tour!

We drove through Coral Gables which was this gorgeous area where a lot of the house are made of coral (bottom left) and the streets are all lined with these crazy tangled up trees (top left) where the roots grow down from the top to reach the ground and form more tangles. Apparently these only grow in a few tropical regions so I thought they were worthy of a photo. We passed by a playhouse (bottom right) where they were doing an Alfred Hitchcock show which I thought was fun. And then we moved on to the boat portion of the tour where I saw a cruise ship in person for the first time (top right). Cruise ships are bigger monstrosities than I ever imagined. It was a little scary getting so close to it! (That tiny bridge below it has cars on it. You can't even see them! Huge, I tell ya.)

Above are various celebrity mansions from Star Island. This was pretty much the main feature of the boat tour. We went all around, learning which mansion belonged to which star and how much they cost. I couldn't tell you who any of these belong to because celebrity stuff is not something I really care about, but they were cool looking so I took some photos anyway. ;)

This one seemed pretty worthy of my attention though so it gets it's own special spot.


This is the Scarface mansion where those final crazy scenes were shot. I thought that was pretty interesting to see. The only other one that really grabbed my attention was Al Capone's old mansion. I didn't get a shot of it though because there was a two story little plain looking house in front of it where his armed guards apparently stayed, so it didn't make a great photo.

So that is my vacation in a tiny little nutshell. I feel like summer has officially started. Swimming in a crystal clear ocean will do that to you. How are you enjoying (or staying out of) this crazy hot weather? We actually have some relief here today which is pretty nice. Hope your week is going well!