To read the first article in the series, click here.
The drive to Miami was a long one, not in terms of distance, but in the sense that we had taken our essential stops already and now we would need to drive continuously. We were mostly on the high road and therefore, there was nothing much to see again. We chatted in the car and put on some Bangla music for the road. Besides, we kept rotating our seats so that our bodies kept moving. We reached Miami at 1 PM and decided to go straight to South Beach. We didn’t realize just how big Miami is. We reached Ocean Dr (the beach road) at 2. We were lucky to have found parking at the Municipal Parking lot. The beach was five minutes away from there.
We took our bathing clothes and got onto Ocean Dr. This is the road that the main beach road of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was modeled after. There are lots of restaurants, bars, and nightclubs along the road. We walked to Hotel Clevelander, some five minutes away. This is also the hotel that Ocean View (the first save point in Vice City) was modeled after. I got the information from Google, however, Clevelander looked quite different from Ocean View. Firstly, Clevelander is smaller. Secondly, the front staircase is very congested. Finally, the Clevelander is just one small off-white building, and it does not have the adjacent smaller sections that Ocean View has.
Every hotel and club was picturesque, and if we wanted to click photos of every eye-candy we came across, we would end up spending the night on the street.
We walked to the beach from there. The beach had many people. The water was nothing different from Cox’s Bazar (CxB). Just like Laboni sea beach, CxB, the sand is irritating, and it sticks to your body. It also gets mixed up with the turbulence of the waves, and it makes the water progressively turbid towards the shore. It would be wrong, however, to say that we did not enjoy it. We loved the wind. But we enjoyed WPB more.
On each beachside are shower stations where we washed off the sand and got back to our vehicle. We were charged $6 for two hours. We then started for South Pointe Park Pier. It would be difficult to assume how far away this place is from Ocean Dr, but it took us close to an hour owing to the Miami Christmas Eve traffic. We had a tough time finding a parking spot. We did eventually find one after searching desperately for nearly half an hour, at a small parking lot for $2/hour. We reserved the spot till 8. We had to then walk down several roads to the pier park.
I had been traveling in the Malibu. Our Jeep decided to take a spot at the pier parking lot. They asked for $40. They eventually haggled till $20.
It was 5:30 and I enjoyed Pier Park dearly. There is a paved walkway to the pier, and on one side of the walkway is a part of the sea and rocks and palm trees, and on the other is the pier park.
This place was lively as well and booming with tourists. The place was windy. Besides, there are cycling tracks and also some lesser-trodden paths amid shrubbery.
We walked to the pier, but the pier was closed off. We then went to the beach and sat down and listened to the sound of the waves. The ships on the horizon had lights all over them and it felt very in-place.
I decided to walk the park alone. The cool wind on my hair felt reveling. I only went back to the party after they decided to leave for dinner. We then went to dinner and after that finally went to the AirBNB. Our car was the first to arrive. We got fresh pretty quickly, took note of the AirBNB regulations, and then the three of us decided to walk the streets of Miami ourselves at 11:30.
It was Christmas Eve, and letting this night go to waste wouldn’t be wise. We immediately walked into a Latin neighborhood. Finding your way around might be challenging as few people speak English here, however, the people are very welcoming. We joined some of their festivities. Every single house had fireworks. The sky was lit, and we loved the locals. We walked until our knees gave in. Some of the locals even paused their festivities and made passage for us to go, only to realize we weren’t the slightest bit agitated, rather we liked what was happening. We then decided that we were tired and walked for half an hour back to our AirBNB.
I learnt a very important thing about traveling in the States on this trip. If you are planning on traveling in the USA, you need to learn to use the full potential of your map application. Exits appear suddenly on the interstate, so you’d need to rely on the app to tell you beforehand that you are approaching one. Besides, map applications here show you where an accident occurred or where there’s a police check-post beforehand so that you can prepare yourself. Furthermore, it is difficult to drive together on the road here because the roads are much more developed, so vehicles are always speeding. So, you’d find yourself using the “Live Location” feature more often than not to know where the other vehicle is at when you are at a sizable party. One feature that I used a lot is the “Dropped Pin” feature in Apple Maps, where you mark a location on a map and it stays there. I used it to mark parking locations, convenience stores, and also our AirBNB. We used my pin to find our way back to our place. We then fell asleep.