USA Holiday 2, October 04 (The Wildcat)

Went across to Bayside again to hop on one of the walk-up bay tours - at least we got to do half of the planned tour still. The tour was pretty good, you get taken around a few of the islands including Star Island where all the celebrities live. The tour was narrated quite well also.

I'm on a boat.

Miami skyline.

Scarface house.

Shaq's old house.

American Airlines Arena.

I tracked down one of the visitor centres to get directions for the Monday night NFL game. As a bonus she even used to work at Sun Life Stadium aka Land Shark Stadium aka Dolphins Stadium. Unfortunately that didn't help. She took about half an hour to explain basically stuff I had already pieced together (painfully), which was that I needed to take a bus from South Beach to downtown, a train part of the way, then a bus to within walking distance from the stadium (but not actually to the stadium). Coming back I'd need to switch over about three buses (since they typically go either south or east and I need to go south east then over to the beach), but I could do it with about four or five different combination of buses. They used to have some special football service until a couple of years ago - something about a state/federal law being passed where they couldn't legally charge an additional cost for it meant they just shut it down instead.

The best alternative I worked out was if we left the game a few minutes early, ran for a bus not that close to the stadium (since the service takes a different route after 8pm, awesome) and get back just in time for the very last train of the night. From there I figured it would be easy to catch a bus from the downtown metro centre over to South Beach, so didn't bother to research exact times.

Back to the beach after that, for the second and final time. I didn't really deal any better with the perceived (or otherwise) sunburn this time than last. I forgot to mention in the pharmacies they were selling sunscreen up to I think SPF 80+, perhaps I should have tried some of that.

Left the hotel for the Dolphins game 2-3 hours early, but everything went smoothly on the way there. Except for getting to and from South Beach, the rest of the way would have been really easy to drive, since it's basically just a few long, wide roads - and like the Patriots, they put the stadium a long way from downtown (it's cheap, who cares how people actually get there). Some stupid Australian couple got on the bus with a full slab of beer and started drinking, despite the fact you aren't supposed to even drink or eat anything on the bus. I'm pretty sure everywhere in Australia you can't drink beer on a bus either, so don't know what they were thinking. Arrived at the stadium to a massive tailgating car park. To me it seems a little bit of a strange ritual to want to carry so much BBQ junk to a game and then just eat standing in the parking lot next to strangers for a couple of hours. Particularly when you consider people get to do this eight times a season at most, I'm not really sure why it has become such a tradition.

Tailgating.

And even more tailgating.

We were up in the top stand for the night game, which was actually kind of cold and windy which was a bit unusual. The view from the seats was pretty reasonable though, close to the halfway line. A pretty poor first half with Miami getting an early touchdown and then two field goals for New England, so the Dolphins were still up by one. The second half had much more action and variety, featuring a kickoff return touchdown to start the quarter, then later a blocked field goal return touchdown and an interception touchdown. It's very rare for the defense to get all three different types of touchdown.

Outside the stadium.

Half the fun is getting to your seat.

Miami at night.

View from the seats.

Dolphins pregame.

It's Tom Brady !

With New England having won the game we left a few minutes early to run for the bus. Made it with a couple of minutes to spare and also connected on time for the last train. Everything was going well until we made it to downtown. It's completely dead. Had to wait around 30 minutes for a bus to come along, in the dimly lit bus depot with the people sleeping in the shelters, good fun.