So I’ve returned from a trip of leisure to Miami Beach, where I visited my step dad Tom and we had ourselves a rip roaring time. Instead of writing a regular post about it I thought I’d just list some impressions I had and post some pics.

Miami Beach is an island all its own, located east of Miami across a causeway and accessed by a bridge that goes by a major shipping pier with some of the largest cranes in the world.

Tom and I spent nearly every sunset drinking at the Miami Beach VFW, which is filled with characters and has a view of downtown Miami. We also hit up Mac’s Club Deuce a few times, which is a 1920’s era dive bar and exactly as cool as you’d think (the pic of Mac’s is not mine but I did see the cool dude with the eye patch sitting exactly in that spot at the bar).

Miami Beach is a top-notch white sand beach and attracts tourists from around the world, which makes for a crazy multilingual speedo infested scene. I noted a lot of French, Italian, and Russian tourists. Everybody acts like they’re hot shit on Miami Beach-Patton Oswalt has a bit in his new special about everyone on Miami Beach being an alpha personality. The restaurants and hotels along Ocean Drive (located by the beach) are all fancy and expensive and feature stuff like $50 pitchers of mojitos.

Tom took me on a basement to roof tour of Marlin’s Park, where he works as the guy who maintains the retractable roof. Very cool work if you can get it!

We toured Little Havana, which is in Miami near the stadium. Highlights included an awesome Cuban breakfast at a local counter, drinking my first Cafe Cubano, and watching tobacco leaves get hand rolled into cigars. If you never want to sleep again I recommend two cafe cubanos and one cigar.

On my last full day in town we drove down to Key Largo and ate our weight in delicious seafood and checked out the swampy everglades.  The main highway back to Miami was fenced in on both sides to protect speeding traffic from being devoured by alligators.

Finally Tom drove me back to the airport and dropped me right into one last apocalyptic Florida sunset. Good times! It’s taken me three days to recover.