Cheryl's Notes:

Yesterday, we woke up and realized that our boat had dragged during the night. We quickly pulled up anchor and moved closer to Scandia to drop the anchor again. While we were executing this maneuver, we noticed that our fuel gauge was no longer working. We had to tear the aft cabin apart to get to the fuel tank, and work our way through trouble shooting the problem. We finally resolved that the sensor in the fuel tank has failed. Now the big question is, do we replace it or work with a fuel used per hour calculation? While tearing apart all of the engine compartments, we also noticed that the air filter element had completely disintegrated. Can't run the engine long without one of those. Better order a new one.

That brings us to our adventure in Miami today. The part that we needed was at a marine store along the Miami River. We are anchored a little far away for a dinghy ride, and we would have had to cross two major shipping lanes. The Miami harbor was not easy to traverse in our bigger boat, we were not interested in trying to get there by dinghy. So now what? We decided to get adventuresome and take public transportation. Our trip started as follows: dinghy to shore and tie up, walk two blocks to catch a bus. Okay, not hard so far, but we missed the bus by five minutes and the next one didn't come for another 45 minutes. Time lost already. Took the bus to the Omni station where we then boarded a Metromover that took us to downtown Miami. At the Government Center we disembarked and walked three blocks to catch another bus. This took us right to the marine store that had our parts. Mission accomplished, now repeat the process in reverse. We did take a few side trips. On the bus ride back from the store, we had a roundabout tour of Little Havana. We really stuck out on the bus, looking like real gringo tourists. Someone actually asked us for directions in Spanish, so maybe we blended better than we thought.

Today we were able to see the other side of Miami. It is not all expensive cars and high priced fashion. We saw a lot of homeless here today. They were in parks, doorways, abandoned lots and parked cars. Some were carrying bags, and others pushing their carts. I am guessing that they gravitate here because of the more temperate climate. The north side of downtown Miami is a crumbling wasteland. There are a lot of closed up and abandoned buildings. The Metromover is elevated and you can look down at all of the buildings and empty lots.

John's Notes:

Charles Dickens could have written "Tale of Two Cities" about Miami. Our tour of downtown Miami and Little Havana have nothing in common with South Beach. About the only similarity is that about 60% of all the cars are luxury models. If you own a Mercedes or BMW down here, it's like most of us common folk who own Ford or Chevy's. (well then there are folks like me who own Japanese). To be impressive you have to own a Mazerati, Lamborghini or some other exotic brand. Only saw three Rolls Royce's today. I might have mentioned before that being a millionaire around here pretty much only qualifies you to make the down payment on something or pay the sales tax.

Public transportation is a pain in the ass here. Part of it is free and the other part costs an arm and a leg because you can't get a transfer to get on another bus. While we were waiting for our first bus there was a sign that informed us that each trip was $2.00 per person. Well, we calculated that we needed to take four buses as part of our trip. The sign said that you could get an all day pass for $5.00 per person. You don't have to be a math whiz to figure that the all day pass was the "ticket." Along comes the bus and we tell the driver that we want two all day passes. Driver informs us that she doesn't sell all day passes. We have to take a bus downtown and go to one of the transfer stations that sell those. Swell. Now we need $2.00 each. No problem if you have a pocket full of one dollar bills. The smallest bill we had was a $5.00. Since we had to wait 45 minutes for the bus we decided to use the $5.00 and forget the change. We lucked out, however, because the next person that got on the bus was going to pay with 8 quarters and the bus driver finally convinced her to just pay a dollar and give us the other 4 quarters. It took awhile because the bus driver, like us, did not speak the local language. English is not the native tongue here.

When we get to the place that sells all day passes we again ran into problems. You have this machine that sells all sorts of passes. We thought we had programmed it correctly but it kept wanting to charge us $2.00 extra for some reason. Lucky for us they have a roving customer service person that showed us how to correctly place our order. What gets me is that by the time we got back to the boat we had spent a total of $14.00 on transportation , $36.00 on parts, and $8.00 on food. I'm guessing that it's hard to spend a day ashore in Miami without spending $50.00 or more.

Oh, did I mention the assortment of weird people we encountered today. The guy who writes the cartoon Bizarro would not have to look much farther than the local public transportation system for inspiration. We stopped at a Wendy's for a quick snack this afternoon. There is a guy standing in line to order and when he gets to the front of the line, he has no money. He just starts panhandling the line for change. If that isn't bad enough, there is a guy sitting at a table up against the wall and it appears that he is talking to someone on the phone. From what I can gather from the conversation, he is either applying for or talking to someone about a job. He is going over his past experiences, etc. I know it's tough economic times but the only thing keeping this guy from maybe actually getting a job is his lack of an actual phone. I don't know what he was hearing in his ear but it certainly wasn't another live person.

I'm thinking that maybe 2010 has the possibility of being a better year. If we can only hold out just one more day.