Within twelve hours of landing in Orlando and meeting up with my parents, we were back on the open road, this time sitting in the back seat for a change, heading towards Miami for a family road trip. Delores, our dashboard hula girl, remained quite still on the long, smooth and perfectly flat Florida highways aboard the luxury SUV my Dad had hired. Outside the window, with the temperatures breaching the 30C mark (86F) and the humidity soaring, wide expanses of lush green fields rolled by beneath a deep blue sky. Journeying further into the heart of the sunshine state, small islands of tall palm trees appeared, dotted among the swaying grasses of the Florida marsh lands and mangroves where, according to our now battered guide-book, over a million fresh water alligators live. On the distant horizon, immense storm clouds billowed and grew, creeping ever closer as our drive continued. Soon, once the sky had been completely devoured, we were directly beneath it - a tropical storm of biblical proportions. Traffic slowed to a crawl, the lights of the truck piled high with oranges in front of us vanished behind a wall of water, and white hot cracks of lightning tore the sky in two and shook the earth around us. The wiper blades flashed across the screen at full speed. Headlights appeared out of nowhere on the opposite side of the road and the world sank into a swirl of grey cloud. As it competed with the roar of the rain on the roof, the chirpy country song floating from the radio buzzed and died intermittently as more bolts of electricity consumed the air outside.
After a mile or so, and as if someone had clicked their fingers, the rain suddenly stopped. We crossed a line in the road where the tarmac switched from glossy wet to perfectly dry - the razor sharp edge of the downpour. A seam between the clouds opened up and the tropical sunshine beamed down on us once again. The gloomy banks of cloud lifted and fizzled into an empty blue sky as a great white heron took flight from a nearby river.
One hundred and fifty miles further along the dead-straight road, the houses, sprawling shopping malls and out of town chain motels of Miami's periphery began to appear. The swamps and fields fell away behind us and a coastline fringed with sparkling white, five-star tower block hotels lay ahead. Weaving through the busy streets, past boutique shops and trendy bars, we hopped over sparkling lagoons and canals and gasped at the size of the waterfront mansions (and luxury speedboats) which lined them. Through the rush hour traffic, we made our way towards Miami Beach and our (almost) beach-side hotel. Once our driver had been replenished with an ice cold beer from the cool box, we headed out for our first taste of Miami and, for my parents, their first taste of Cuban cuisine which is particularly abundant in a state that, at its southern extremity, sits around ninety miles from Castro's Caribbean island.
Although rather too trendy for our tastes (and full of overpriced tourist trap bars) the Art Deco district in Miami's South Beach is (despite the shirtless frat boys posing along it's promenade) a beautiful trip into nineteen-thirties architecture. If you can stand the college spring-break vibe (and the searing heat) for a few hours, it is certainly worth a visit for those "oh-so-Miami" postcard shots of pastel coloured hotels, sharp lines, bold curves and vintage signage.
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