Aug 5
Time to escape the high heat and the nudging 100% humidity of Bermuda, so we are flying to Florida tomorrow for, er more of the same. Actually as an expert in sweating during summers, I think Florida’s heat is a lot more bearable, probably due to modern day air-conditioning. Our Bermuda home built of large slabs of limestone is more than 200 years old, and the air-conditioning units possibly not much younger!
Please click for moreWe are on our way to Miami this morning, an almost 3-hour flight from Bermuda, and once again just like last time our daughter is on her way separately with the Bermuda swim team to Barbados.
This time it is CCCAN (Central American and Caribbean Amateur Swimming Confederation) Championships. The meet could realistically have been anywhere in Central America or the Caribbean, and selfishly it is a shame that we are back in Barbados again, although at least it will be familiar surroundings.
Please click for moreWe are in Miami today just me and the free-as-a-bird-other-half. There are plans and motives and proposals of high-end shopping, high-jinks drinking, high-life eating and high-fidelity dancing, but let’s be honest we will probably be wrapped up in bed by 8.
The reason we are on our own is because our 12-year daughter is on her way to Barbados with the Bermuda swim team, after qualifying for CARIFTA, which is the Caribbean youth games (U18).
I fly to Florida tomorrow for a few days mostly to check in on the house in Sarasota. See what the latest round of excuses are from the variety of contractors and artisans. No doubt our furniture is being sourced from Moscow.
Please click for more🔝5️⃣ Restaurants are the next subject of my 2021 Top Fives. My dry January and eating healthier hasn’t quite gone to plan. Very off plan in fact, and may explain my love of the nice things in life.
Eating out has been a very different experience since the pandemic and restaurants have suffered more than most. Many need support, and I was lucky to enjoy some great meals out attempting in some small way to do that last year. Here are my 2021 Top Five Favourite Restaurants 🥩
Please click for more🔝5️⃣. Next up on my look back at the year that wasn’t of 2021 is My Top Five Favourite Places. Not quite as limited on exploration as the year before, nevertheless the five were relatively easy to select.
There was nowhere new, but plenty of places revisited, one in particular was long overdue. Here are my 2021 Top Five Favourite Places 🌇
Please click for moreI’m back in Bermuda after our little sojourn to Miami Beach. We stayed just a couple of miles south of Chaplain Towers in Surfide, the site of Thursday’s building collapse tragedy. We drove by it last Monday to have dinner in Bal Harbour, a condo building in a row of non-descript 1980 oceanfront buildings punctuated occasionally by plush hotels.
My heart goes out to every family and friend waiting on news of loved ones 💔
Please click for moreA little bit of a mini break for the next couple of days as we head to Miami later.
Florida has long moved on from the pandemic and apparently visitor numbers are almost back to pre-Covid times. Double vaccinated Americans are increasingly moving around the country and I expect Miami Beach to be busy.
Please click for more🔝5️⃣ A global pandemic has curtailed a lot of eating out, and it has been the year of the take-away. Even Bermuda now has a delivery service 25 years after Pizza Hut first started doing it.
Like elsewhere for long parts of this year restaurants were shut on the island (fortunately for us they are open again although with plenty of restrictions), and we are lucky that for most of the time we are able to sit outside.
My next 2019 Top Five picks surround food, and, well, more food.
My waistline is evidence of lots of good eating out last year, although I did seem to do that mostly in Miami and New York. It was tough to select my Top Five Favourite Restaurants but I narrowed it down to a handful in the end plus some notable mentions.
Next on my agenda for my 2019 Top Five’s is Hotels. Those that know me or have had more than a cursory glance at this Blog will have worked out that I have a fascination with hotels. My travels were way down on previous years, but I managed to still have 20 locations to pick from and these were my Top Five Favourite Hotels:
It’s Bermuda Cup Match long weekend, a cricket game that shuts the island down and we don’t have to go to work. Yay. So the choice is going to the game, which I have done many times, camp on the side of the road like the locals do, sit indoors under the a/c, or make use of the bank holiday and get off the island. We’ve done the latter.
We haven’t really left the humid weather behind because we are in Florida, but despite similar heat levels, you never seem too far from proper air conditioning here, so the sweaty uncomfortableness doesn’t seem quite as brutal.
The trip starts on the gulf coast to check in on the long running saga of a house renovation we are doing in Sarasota. I’ll leave that there because the slight mention of it gets me into a embittered temper and a grump.
*Counts to 5*
A quick weekend in Miami to meet the exhausted-other-half and our little Edwina the Eagle daughter after their week skiing in Colorado. Whilst I made the short hop across from Bermuda this morning, they had to suffer a midnight flight and a red-eye from Denver.
A pretty quiet weekend should ensue and a welcome break from work, which is currently relentless and unsympathetic to doing much else including sleeping through the bloody night.
I spent 80 nights in hotels in 2018 staying at 29 different ones. No wonder the other half says I’m never at home.
Picking my Top Five Favourite Hotels from 2018 was extremely difficult as I was very fortunate to stay in some great places, a few I’d been to before such as last year’s favourite, the 1 Hotel in Miami.
Last one from last year. I like to explore, I like to travel, I like to eat.
I keep a list of the restaurants I visit, mostly away from Bermuda, and gee, last year was a difficult choice. It’s a little New York centric, but pride of place goes to an absolute gastronomical experience in my kinda town, Chicago. There were two or three great places that never made My Top Five Favourite Restaurants from 2018, but these ones did:
Chicago Addick 