Miami 2022: Diary – Day 8

We slept in on our last day and enjoyed a late breakfast before heading out for the day.

Calle Ocho

Our plan for the morning was to head off to Calle Ocho in Little Havana. It was only a few miles from the hotel so it was a short Lyft to get there. Luckily traffic was minimal and it only took a few minutes for the Lyft to arrive.

We walked up and down the street looking in the shops and sights along the way. There were a lot of cigar shops! It was definitely interesting to see Cuban culture on full display.

We ended up at a restaurant to have an early lunch since the boys saw an ice cream shop they wanted to try and they knew they couldn’t get that until after lunch. Suddenly they were hungry. Funny how that works….

After a disappointing lunch, we were excited to try Azucar Ice Cream. They have developed about 50 “Cuban” flavors of ice cream, some of which are pretty interesting. Tomatico ended up with flan flavored ice cream. My wife ended up with rose petal ice cream. She says it was like eating perfume. My youngest ended up with cookies and cream and I ended up with strawberry, because of course we got the most normal flavors, though we ended up switching because he liked mine more.

After a little more shopping we headed back to the hotel for the afternoon. The boys went to the pool and found a friend to play with. While the hotel pool is small, in the afternoon the pool itself was in the shade while most of the chairs were in the sun. That was great to keep sunburns to a minimum.

Dinner

The boys were getting hungry from their time in the pool and we decided to go back to the Friends Market & Bistro from the first night. When we got to the lobby, we saw it was an absolute downpour outside. While the restaurant is only a 10 minute walk, we would be soaked through by the time we got there.

I looked at booking a Lyft, but surge pricing was on and it would have cost us $40 for the .5 mile ride. We decided to instead take the MetroMover to the stations across the street from the restaurant. Unfortunately, the way the stations are organized is that we had to transfer between trains which meant it took about 20 minutes to actually make it to our destination, but at least we were dry when we got there. It also helped that it had stopped raining by the time we arrived at the destination.

We had a wonderful and tasty dinner before a relaxing walk back to the hotel. We even got to see the drawbridge go up just after we walked over it.

Back in the hotel, Tomatico and I started packing before going down to the gym for a quick workout. Back in the room, we finalized our packing and set alarms for the morning.