So I guess I already talked a bit about Sunday. After our horrendous flight from Tampa to Miami, and a much more comforting taxi ride to the President Hotel on Collins Avenue in South Beach, we wanted to explore. So we walked north on Collins a bit, to 21st Street or so, then turned left, walked down to Washington Avenue, then walked south on Washington a bit. Then back to Collins, stopping at a Walgreens to get beverages, then at Jerry's Deli for cold cuts, bread, pickles and cole slaw to make a simple dinner back in our hotel rooms (actually, we ate together in Kevin's room).
So as I said before, this hotel was kinda way out there. All white, but with green blown up photos of leaves adorning a wall of each room. Kevin's room was a little more posh than mine - he had a walk-in closet, a big bathroom, a round bed(!) and a second chair, which was a soft cloth covered chair in the shape of a large leaf(! again). That was where I sat whenever we hung out together. Also his tv was either a little fancier than mine or a little newer, since he seemed to get more channels and overall better reception.
So we ate our simple dinner and watched a movie and talked a little about the next couple of days. We had an invitation from this guy Sherwin to go to his shop in Weston way up near Fort Lauderdale, and he was offering to pick us up in Miami and bring us up there. We also wanted to visit Forcade Cigars, run by the Forcade sisters, Annia and Chistrian. But we decided to take it easy on Monday and maybe do those things Tuesday and Wednesday.
Monday morning I googled cigar shops in South Beach on my phone, hoping we might find some nice places to smoke besides our lovely patio (not that the patio wasn't a great place to smoke, but we were all by ourselves, and I figured it might be cool to find a place where other folks go to smoke their cigars in South Beach). I found a bunch, and went exploring while Kevin was sleeping in a bit. Some of the ones I found were, upon exploring, no longer in existence, but I did find a cool spot on Lincoln Road called Deco Drive Cigars, a smallish lounge with a nice humidor room and lots of outdoor tables with hookahs and such.
I went to Jerry's Deli for breakfast, expensive eggs and bacon and tomato juice, and in popped Kevin. He had gotten information from our hotel desk person on where to do our laundry, so we went back, got our clothes and dropped them off at a cleaner on 12th Street. Our minds now at ease with our one chore of the day accomplished, we decided to walk down Washington Avenue a ways and then come back up Collins.
On Washington we didn't see too much. The old City Hall was pretty impressive - Kevin took some pictures - and there were some interesting looking restaurants and beachware stores, but that was about it. So when we got to about 5th street, we turned back up Collins. We'd heard there was a shopping district down there, but it turned out to be a lot of the chain stores you see in New York City or just about any other city or shopping mall, so we weren't very impressed.
Just about the time we were getting tired and in need of a break from the sun, we passed the Webster, a building that has a new French restaurant in its lobby and a fashion boutique on two floors, an art gallery on its third floor and a rooftop bar. I thought it might be interesting to look at some clothes, and Kevin sank into a comfortable couch while I marveled at fine cotton shirts costing hundreds of dollars and ladies dresses costing thousands. I talked quite a bit with the clerk, a very nice young French fellow who told me all about the shop and a lot about himself also.
He then offered to show us the roof, and it did look like a really great place to have a drink. Kevin and I told him about our reasons for visiting Miami, mainly cigars, and he told us the restaurant had a selection of cigars, although we could only smoke on the terrace outside. So we went back downstairs and looked at their selection, which was nice but small, and I decided a drink might be nice, so we sat at the bar and relaxed, me with a caipirinha, Kevin with a mojito, and chatted for a while with the bartender, a typically nice talkative bartender. My drink was really good, but Kevin's not so great - there was hardly any mint in it. But it was the perfect thing to relax with a drink in the early afternoon, feeling like we could do anything we wanted to, or just do nothing at all!
We left there and I thought it would be a good time to take him to the cigar lounge on Lincoln Road, so we walked the few blocks up there. We walked straight into the lounge and into the walk-in humidor and were followed by a dark-haired French woman who was working in the lounge at that moment. Well, by the time we walked out of the lounge 15 minutes later, we felt as if we were all good friends. Of course we started out with her asking us what kind of cigars we usually smoke. She tried to steer us toward some Don Pepin cigars, but we figured since we were going to be going to the Pepin factory, we should smoke something else. Kevin saw CAO Amazons, so he took a couple of those. I noticed a couple of Camacho 6x60s, one a Connecticutt and the other some sort of Colorado one, and that's what I selected. Kevin took one of the darker ones also.
Of course while we were doing this, we were engaging in a continuous stream of witty banter with the French woman. We told her a bit about the big extravaganza on Thursday, and she tried to invite herself along, but we explained that it was not within our power to bring any extra people with us. Then as we were purchasing our cigars, she told us how she smoked cigars in her apartment even though her landlord didn't want her to. Her reasoning was that since she was paying to live there, she should be able to do whatever she wanted to do in the apartment.
So then to our patio to smoke some of these newly acquired shmokes. There was a German quartet who were our only companions on the patio - they sat way at the other end of the patio, but on their way in and out they had to pass us. One woman smiled and waved and said hello, one man and one woman frowned and nodded their heads in our direction, and the other man smiled and said "chuss!"
After that, our only company was a couple of squirrels who were grabbing some sort of nuts from the palm trees in the patio and then retiring to the wall between our hotel and the next one over to eat in relative security. One squirrel dropped a bunch of nut on our side of the wall and spent a good deal of time staring down at it and contemplating jumping down to get it, but in the end he reasoned we were too much of a threat and he abandoned the lost booty.
Dinner was from the Deli: a cheeseburger for Kevin and a turkey burger for me. They were very tasty - we actually ate the first half of the food before that evening's cigars and then finished off the rest in our rooms later on.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment