Miami | Chicago Addick

Aug 1

Florida’s high points

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*

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Apr 5

Miami weekender

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.

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Jan 27

My 2018 Top Five Favourite Hotels

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.

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Jan 27

My 2018 Top Five Favourite Restaurants

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:

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Aug 10

Coffee break

Since we’ve been in Bermuda, we have made good use of quickish flights from Miami to Central America and have been fortunate to visit Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama. I took a good look at El Salvador this summer, but decided eventually on Colombia and a city I have longingly admired, Cartagena, which is as the crow flies ‘just around’ the Caribbean coast from Panama City.

Long a safer haven from the geo-political and drug issues of the rest of Colombia, Cartagena is a walled city founded as an important Spanish port almost 500 years ago. The Old Town of Cartagena is a UNESCO world heritage site and by all accounts is a colourful burst of mazy streets with cobbled alleyways and leafy plazas juxtaposed across the bay by a jumble of modern high rises and a busy seaport.

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Apr 1

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Nobu

In Miami for a day and night en route to Colorado for some last minute skiing. The snow omens are good with a fresh powder of snow covering the Rockies. We get to Vail tomorrow lunchtime.

The Easter weather in Bermuda has been chilly (yep I know) but we could feel the warmth as we left Miami Airport this morning, possibly because we had our ski stuff on to save packing it, but the sun has warmed us all, and there were a lot of burnt bodies sat this afternoon by our pool in Miami Beach.

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Feb 18

My 2017 Top Five Favourite Hotel’s

The second of my belated 2017 Top Five’s is Hotels. I stayed in 26 different hotels last year, but after much back and forth I’ve chosen five, so please join me to test the bouncyness of the bed, the 500 thread sheets and copious amount of pillows that usually end up on the floor as I guide you through My 2017 Top Five Favourite Hotel’s:

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Feb 18

My 2017 Top Five Favourite Restaurants

I got a little waylaid with these, well actually I forgot. But selfishly I wanted to post them, so close your eyes if you’re not interested in a little narcissism.

I going to post my final three 2017 Top Five’s in quick succcesion starting with Restaurants. Picking five wasn’t easy but I’ve had a crack so these were my Top Five Favourite Restaurants of 2017:

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Oct 22

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Where am I?

I stared at the Arrivals board at Miami airport today to see which carousel my bag was going to end up at and for the life of me I could not remember where I had just flown in from. It was San Francisco and last week was every part of fun and successful, but the time difference was a killer for me this time as well as carrying around a stinking cold.

Vegas was low key, we could feel the numbness and it was quieter than I remember it from other times. Los Angeles was hot, and hectic. Burbank we saw one of our largest clients and home to the ‘happiest place on earth.’ The San Francisco days were long and exhausting mostly stuck in a room, and when we went outside it was chilly.

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Oct 15

Summer of catastrophe’s

I have had a tremendous summer of travel, but my head spins when I think about where I have been and some of the absolute sadness and tragedy that many of these places have had to deal with, and how lucky I’ve been to miss some of these awful events.

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Sep 10

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Hurricane Irma

Like a lot of others I am sat tonight glued to CNN and the Weather Channel like it’s a drug. One of the reasons is work related. I live and breathe risk during the week, natural, human or otherwise, so what is happening in Florida and happened to those poor Caribbean islands and Texas last week has massive ramifications for us at work.

For reason’s I haven’t fathomed I seem to be rather attracted to hurricanes. I wouldn’t mind but I can’t even fly a kite. Yet in the last couple of weeks I have been in St Barts, Saint Martin, Sarasota, Tampa and Miami and I live on an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean that has annoyingly been a recent magnet to big storms, around 7 or 8 hurricanes in the past 5 years, once we even had two different hurricanes over consecutive weekends!

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Jul 14

Booming Brickell

My daughter broke up from school a couple of weeks back and as both the other half and I are working we have to do a lot of juggling and role her around camps for the 10 weeks holiday she gets. Already bored of that, us not her, we’ve decided to take her to Miami for the weekend and then possibly up to the coast to Palm Beach early next week where I am at a conference, or work vacation as my 7-year old calls it!

Taking our 7-year old to Miami of course is a little bit of a ruse and we will eat, shop and people watch well whilst there. But mostly the family all appear knackered, so there will be lots of pool down time.

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Apr 9

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Gone MIA

After a few days in New York working, or as my daughter calls it, on work vacation, I headed south for the rest of the week to Miami where I met up with the family.

New York was good, and I particularly liked staying across the river in Brooklyn, although at certain times of the day the Brooklyn Bridge bore close resemblance to the Dartford Bridge in rush hour. On my last night I met up with old mate New York Addick, where we talked Charlton and the unmitigated disaster of Duchatelet’s ownership.

After many pints we came to the conclusion that Duchatelet hasn’t purposely tried to kill the club, but rather mass incompetence, utterly poor management and sheer stubbornness has resulted in the diabolical situation the club finds itself in. NYA’s most recent analysis of the club’s accounts are well worth a read by the way.

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Oct 26

Adele

We long had tickets for Adele’s first night in Miami and had worked the half-term break, which included our daughter’s 7th birthday today, around the Tottenham lasses 96th night of her tour (15 to go) as she reminded the 20,000 crowd last night at the Miami Heat’s American Airlines Arena.

Our night started rather chaotically as we were met with a huge and disgruntled crowd outside the arena. It wasn’t like this place wasn’t used to crowds, but apparently the ticket bar code readers were failing the surprisingly small group of staff holding up entry to the event. News of the late arrival of Hillary Clinton I am sure threw security and those still outside added angst.

When Adele came on an hour late, there were still many empty seats in the long sold out arena. Mine was empty too as I was queuing at the bar as I listened to ‘Hello’ from the concourse.
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Oct 22

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Californication

After an excellent week in California I flew back today to Miami, where the family will meet me tomorrow for half-term.

So, I have a night on my own in Miami, and after checking out the DJ line ups in South Beach, I have made the executive decision to not leave my bed, and after 5 hotels in 6 days, it is a treat to not have to be running out of the door. My night is set, I have wine and I will watch the Chicago Cubs hopefully secure a World Series spot for the first time since 1945.

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