Today started very well as I woke up and Lara was here :-).  She arrived late last night so we are now complete.  I also started the day eating well – oranges and watermelon followed by a small bowl of granola for breakfast.

I struggle to use the crockery here though as it is made of the same nerve jangling scrapey  stuff as the brown bowls that blighted my childhood breakfasts and desserts.   There is something about these bowls (the plates are not so bad) that make a noise when scraped by a spoon that is on a par with nails down a blackboard!  My sisters will understand what I mean.

My 3 sisters will all be amused and not at all surprised to hear that I have come to Florida, a place almost guaranteed to provide sunshine year round, and am experiencing rain.  I am unlucky with the weather whenever I go to Devon.  So unlucky in fact that they plan their holidays around me i.e. if I head West they run in the opposite direction.  Today we experienced, from a great distance luckily, Hurricane Sandy.  The normally blue skies of South Beach have been replaced by the grey skies we are all used to at home, along with high winds and torrential rain.

Palm fronds are very large when found lying on the ground.

The wind and rain are playing havoc with my usually immaculately coiffed hair 🙂

So what do we do when it rains in South Beach?  Shop of course.  South Beach is full of these tacky/kitsch shops selling all manner of tasteless clothes and holiday souvenirs.  There are also lots of quality shops too.

Between the tacky and the more interesting/tasteful shops, plus lunch, we happily amused ourselves for 8 hours!  My family are so good at amusing themselves.

Oh what fun we had.

Lara wanted to try a Starbucks to see if the USA ones were the same as at home (they are) and we allowed Harvey to have his first ever coffee.  He’s the man!

At lunch time Lara spotted a great cafe called Nexxt Cafe.  It was a great choice for lunch as it was busy with a lively and friendly ambience.  We all ordered a burger as they had some really interesting combinations and they looked fantastic.  Harvey’s had macaroni cheese on it – truly!

I chose a BBQ flavoured one which came with onion rings.  At home I despise onion rings and never eat them.  So I was confident I would eat my BBQ spicy Southern burger with green chili and cheese and pass the onion rings on.  However, these were excellent as they tasted of real onions and were in a very crispy batter.  So I am slightly ashamed to say I ate the lot.  It was brilliant.

We arrived back at our apartment very wet but safe.  It was very frightening walking back as the wind was so high and the rain extremely heavy.  We were all soaked through to our undies – literally everything was dripping wet and could be wrung out.  Even new clothes which were still in bags were wet.  Relax – no photos of our wet under garments :-).

The bonus of eating so much at lunch time is that we didn’t need dinner.  Just a little something.  Lara made a fantastic guacamole, using half the huge avocado, half a fresh  lime and a large plum tomato, mashed with lime juice.  We ate this with Doritos.

The wind and rain are worse so we are not going out again tonight.  We have a jug of margaritas, the cards are out and we are all happy here.  Hope you are too.