Miami 2022: Diary – Day 6

Since we were now staying at a Hyatt, full breakfast for the family was included as a benefit of my Globalist status and we were looking forward to taking advantage. In the lobby we found where breakfast was served and we got seated before heading to get our food at the buffet.

The buffet was one of the more complete ones we’ve seen since COVID. There were a lot of quality options to choose from including hot items and lots of cut fruit. When I got the bill the waiter assured me that because of my status it would be wiped off the final bill. That’s a good thing because it was almost $130 for the four of us!! It was a decent breakfast, but not work that much if it’s coming out of my own pocket!

Topgolf Adventure

For work, I was going to split my (half) day between the morning and the afternoon. Tomatico wanted to go do Topgolf, which is kind of like a driving range, but with shooting/scoring games to make it more competitive, even for less skilled players.

Since it didn’t open until 10am, I worked for a couple hours in the morning before we grabbed a Lyft to get to the Topgolf location. It took much longer than expected for the Lyft to arrive and they switched our driver several times. There is a LOT of traffic congestion near our hotel and in Downtown Miami in general.

We did make it to Topgolf by about 10:30 and there were only a few other groups there so it felt like we had the place to ourselves. We got signed in, got our clubs and made it to our stall. Our waitress helped us sign in and get oriented. The boys loved it. We started by signing up for 60 minutes, but we ended up extending another hour. The boys teamed up to try to beat my score. They were trying to hit the further targets, but I found I could score a lot more points by aiming at the nearer targets and hitting them ore often. Overall it was a lot of fun!

After our 2 hours were done we closed our check and I had to jump on a quick work call before we could eat lunch. Once that was done we went back to the restaurant and had some lunch. Service was slow, but the food was good. We could have ordered/eaten the food while we were golfing, but weren’t quite hungry enough at that time.

After we ate, I ordered up the Lyft so I could get back to the hotel to do some more work. Unfortunately, Tomatico informed me that he had lost his mask. We needed a mask to be in a Lyft and I didn’t have any extra. We quickly asked at the front desk and they didn’t have any, but suggested the nearby Walmart might have one.

I had to cancel the Lyft and pay the cancellation fee (grrr) and we waked the 20 minutes to get to the Walmart. When we entered, we were actually able to get a disposable mask for free so we ended up not having to buy one.

I ordered up a new Lyft which got us back to the hotel so I could get some more work done. It was a busy afternoon for me while my wife worked as I tried to put out a fire at my work. The boys watched some Olympics coverage until dinner.

Dinner and Adventures

We decided to split up for dinner because my youngest wanted to try a pizza place we had walked by the previous night. Tomatico and my wife ended up at a Cuban restaurant in the nearby mall area. They enjoyed their dinner. Our pizza was edible but not very good.

After our pizza, we decided to get some gelato at a store my wife had found at the mall the night before. We easily found the place and found they had some interesting flavors. I ended up getting black vanilla, which was just vanilla with activated charcoal to make it dark black. It was pretty good. My youngest got cotton candy flavor that he really liked.

After finishing that, we decided to go for a ride on the MetroMover to see where it went. There are a few different intersecting lines for the train but we ended up doing the loop around Downtown Miami on the Brickell Loop. It wasn’t very busy and we had fun seeing where it went. There were only a half dozen stops. We ended up finding there was a stop closer to the hotel than the one we had used before. After going through the complete loop, we took that stop and found there was a tunnel that went directly to our hotel so we didn’t even have to go outside!

Back at the hotel we watched some more Olympic coverage and I multitasked with some more work that was blowing up. Tomatico and my wife got back from their shopping spree with some bags as Tomatico had gotten some clothes and a new pair of shoes. I guess we all had fun!