Miami

We initially were planning to go over to Miami for a whole week with Ina and Jeff's Marathon as a highlight. The week before we left I got a call from the digger who was going to pull all the tree and palmetto stumps out of our yard and he was ready and wanted to start on Monday so our one week Miami trip became a four day trip. But still we had a couple of extra days for touring. First place we went was a Spice and Fruit Garden that was right near our campground. We paid our admission and went in but after walking through the gardens we were griping to ourselves that without a tour to tell you what the strange fruits we were looking at were it wasn't a very good tour. Just at that time a lady in a golf cart pulls up and asks if we'd like a tour of the gardens with her. We jumped in and what a tour she gave - she had worked there for 19 years and knew everything. She stopped and ran over and picked some strange fruit off a tree, cut it into sections and gave it to us to eat while continually talking about the tree and the fruit. Here are the some of the fruits that we didn't eat - The round yellow one is an Egg Fruit (tastes like custard), the green one has a slight vanilla taste and the other yellow is a Star Fruit (we get them locally so it isn't too rare).

She also gave us a whole bunch of pink banana seedlings which I've replanted and will distribute when they are bigger. We next stopped a the Coral Castle which turned out to be a total loser of a place - we never went in - they wanted $16 each and it was just a stone ruin with nothing much to see.

But it did have one of the biggest lizards crawling on it that we had ever seen.

On we went to the Deering Estate - his father started International Harvester.

It was right on Biscayne Bay and had a whole family of Manatees swimming around it in the harbor.

On our way over to Ina's hotel, we toured a couple of the Coral Gable sites, one neat one was this tree lined street.

After Ina and Jeff ran we did one more tour, Vizcaya. It was another huge mansion right on the water and guess who built it - the half brother of the guy who built the Deering Estate.

Neat house with a Venetian boat built in front of it - they used it for dinner parties and dances.

Very nice gardens around the house - That was Ina showing that she still had enough energy to move after running 16.2 miles.