Miami design and graffiti

From St Pete we took the bus down to Miami.  We are quite used to long bus journeys, so at just over seven hours this one would have been fine, had it not been for one woman who managed to spend the entire six hours that she was one the bus speaking loudly on her phone in Spanish.

Goodness knows who she was talking to for that long, but it was most irritating.  We all we relieved when she got off, only to find another woman start up.  Thankfully she only spoke for part of the remaining hour.


Once in Miami, we had another Airbnb to stay at. No coffins this time, but they did have a dog that liked to play, a couple of mostly friendly cats, and some slightly crazy chickens.

 

 

We had thought that we would do the Everglades while in Miami, but in the end we didn't. We discovered that although there is a lot of talk about the importance of the environment in connection with the Everglades National Park, there is no way of getting there on public transport - everyone either has to drive themselves or arrange an expensive private transfer.

 

 

The one alternative is to go on an organised tour. We considered that, but they just give you a short trip on a large and environmentally unfriendly airboat, and then take you to gator land to watch them wrestling with the alligators. That wasn't really what we wanted, so we decided to leave the Everglades to a time when we can come back and do it more as we would want to.

One of the things we did do, was take a walk around the design district and the Wynwood area. The design district was OK, but unless you have a big budget, you're not going to find too much to take home with you.

We did find a place serving good beers and pizzas though.
 

We also wandered amongst the warehouses of the Wynwood area. I know that that this sounds a bit strange, but in fact this is where the graffiti artists have come to do their thing. And they do it on a very large scale, often taking up a whole wall.
 

A few of the designs were mediocre or not to our taste, but most were excellent. I especially liked the black and white ones I think, though the Roy Lichtenstein inspired one was amusing too.

Rock'n'Roll Doomsday

While in St Pete, we were staying at an Airbnb place (will talk about Airbnb in a future post) called the Rock'n'Roll House.  It was an interesting place with eclectic decoration; as well as lots of electric guitars, some signed though we couldn't make out by whom, it had a coffin in the lounge.  We never actually plucked up the courage to check whether it was empty - we figured it was but you just never know!

When we arrived, the guy who met us told us that there was a party in the house that night, as they were previewing an episode of Doomsday Preppers that was about the owner of this place.

Now I don't know if you've heard of Doomsday Preppers, but it a show on National Geographic channel that features various people who believe that the world is going to suffer something catastrophic and follows their preparation for such a doomsday that ends the world as we know it.

Tonight's episode was all about the guy who own the place we were staying in.  He has a family history of doomsday prepping, as his father, Brenton Bruns I was worried about the Y2K, so in 1999 he bought a bomb shelter in the Blue Ridge Mountains of South Carolina.  (In case like me your geography is sufficiently bad that your knowledge of the Blue Ridge Mountains comes from a song that says they are in Virginia, then neither I nor the song is wrong; I checked and the range is huge, huge extending from Georgia up to Pennsylvania.)

Brenton Bruns II is concerned about a huge EMP (electromagnetic pulse) that will make the world - or at least the USA - go dark.  So he has involved his family in building a castle on top of the bomb shelter, to prepare for such an event.  He does say that in fact he is motivated as much by getting his family interacting better as he is by the doomsday threat, but I am sure there must be easier and cheaper ways to arrange a family get together.

Anyhow, we hadn't actually been invited to this party, so we stayed out until about midnight, then figured that if we went back we'd either be included or we could slope upstairs to our room.

We were expecting something riotous to be going on - this is the Rock'n'Roll house after all.  But in fact as we arrived we could hardly hear a thing.  We were greeted by Brenton, who invited us to join them and got us a drink (what is it with the USA and lite beers?). Apparently they were filming inside, so we stayed on the porch with a few other.

News of our arrival obviously spread, as we heard someone ask 'Where are the British people?', and we were soon joined by a few others who were interested to talk to us and hear about our travelling.  They all seemed nice people, and we enjoyed a chat with them, but this was certainly not the kind of party I was expecting for a house of this name.

When the people we were talking to said they had to go, we figured that the rest of the people around - there we only a few - were more to do with the ongoing filming etc, so we decided to leave them to it and go upstairs.  It was only when Brenton said he hoped we wouldn't be disturbed and that he would turn the music down that we realised there was actually any music on.

So not so much Rock'n'Roll, but some nice people and interesting conversations.