Wednesday, March 16, 2011

A (half) Day in Coconut Grove

We back tracked a little yesterday and went South to Dinner Key Mooring Field and Coconut Grove.  Pulled into a slip first to do the dirty work i.e. pumpout....I will spare the details it was rather nasty, Gary and I have differing opinions on what is nasty though, to me it is holding tanks and the accompanying "issues", to him it is poopy diapers.  We also filled up with water so it was a 2-fer!!

Then we motored out to our mooring ball.  This field is wide open to Key Biscayne and the Atlantic Ocean so it was a rather choppy night in an East wind.  But while I was deciding if I would lose my cookies around 11 pm the wind must have shifted because the next thing I knew it was morning and calm as could be.  The wind did shift to the West, hence the calmness of the sea coming off of the land.

Yesterday was a glimpse of Coconut Grove which seems to be mainly a high rent shopping district.  Very nice don't get me wrong but definitely not Target prices or even Dillard's!  The highlight was the Miami City Hall right next to the Marina.  I had read on cruiser's net not to miss this ( it seems that most cruisers do not knowing what lies within.)

It is a gem of restoration.  It was built in 1933 by  Pan American Airlines as their Seaplane Terminal.  It became an attraction with great crowds coming to watch the Planes take off.  It was the main transportation in the US to South America and in 1943 President Roosevelt flew to Morocco on the Dixie Clipper to meet Winston Churchill at the height of WWII.  There were photographs everywhere showing it in its glory and it was very interesting.  The building has been painstakingly restored to mirror how it originally looked in 1933.  With murals near the ceiling depicting the history of flight to the zodiac symbols on the ceiling.  It is truly worth seeing.....  We could go anywhere we wanted even through the offices when we asked to see the pictures in the back office area.  Cool!

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