Nate and Lindsey : We're baaaaack!

So I've only had this blog like, maybe 2 weeks and I'm already WAY behind. So I'm gonna skip hunting for our Christmas tree and our Christmas tree and jump right into our Florida/Bahamas/Florida honeymoon!

We left Friday, December 7 about 1pm. All morning Nate was singing "bouncing in the club where the heat is on all night on the beach till the break of dawn, I'm going to Miami, welcome to Miami!" We flew from Salt Lake to Chicago and then on to Miami. Our first flight was delayed (surprise!) and we almost missed our connecting flight. Luckily for us, our connection in Chicago was delayed as well (please take note of the sarcasm in that sentence). We were supposed to land in Miami at 11:30pm and pick up a rental car. And what do you know, the rental car company closed at midnight! Our flight landed at 11:50 so Nate quickly called and they hooked us up with a sister company that was open 24 hours.

driving to the SLC airport.

When Nate reserves cars he usually just picks compact because its only $14 a day. Well we lucked out with this sister company. They were so nice and told Nate he wouldn't fit and to just take a midsized car. So we sported a sleek black Nissan Altima for a few days.
Back up for a second, on Thursday I had Nate call the hotel we were staying at and make sure that we would still have a reservation even if we didn't get there until after midnight. They of course told him that was no problem at all. It's now 1:00am and we are just dying to get to our hotel and go to bed as its been such a long day. Well, we have a little trouble finding the hotel and get there about 1:30am. And what do you know? They gave away our hotel room and are completely booked. Apparently we weren't the only ones though, we met 3 other groups of people (and heard 1 angry lady through the phone) in the lobby whos rooms they also gave away. Since we had booked it online we of course had the "no refund" clause.
We were especially annoyed since Nate had called to make sure this issue wouldn't happen. The lady was extremely rude and unforgiving about it all. Nate immediately got on the phone and called the booking company to get a refund and wouldn't you know it, miraculously 3 rooms opened up! So we got a room, but it was a hunk of junk and rather than a king bed we got 2 doubles, the next best thing. We were so worn out thought we didn't even care. We stuck it our for the next 2 days.
And just to make things even awesome-r, something in my bag exploded BLACK all over my white shirt and beach bag, not a huge deal but totally not awesome to deal with at 2am. And I still never figured out what it was.

Saturday, December 8

flamingo exhibit at the Miami Zoo.

our cart-bike.

We woke up to heavy rain in the morning but by the time we were ready to head out and do something Miami-y it had mostly stopped so that was nice. We had a nice local breakfast at Denny's and then decided to go to the Miami Zoo which was pretty awesome, I don't know why but I'm a really big fan of zoos. At the zoo they had these cool double wide cart-bikes. So we took advantage and rented one. And it was a good thing, that zoo was huge and we would have been so worn out! We didn't even get to see everything by the time we had to return it so we still ended up walking a bunch. We then headed to Target to use the rest of our wedding giftcards to buy food for lunch and breakfast for the next few days while we were there. It worked out nicely and we ate lunch in the car.

dinosaur leg @ Miami Zoo.

gorillas @ zoo.

Nate in an elephant's bum.

By this time we were sick of Nate's phones GPS not being able to tell us where we were, or how to get where we wanted to go, so we saw a Best Buy and stopped and bought us a GPS! It was a smart move because we were both about ready to just throw his phone into the ocean! With our new GPS we were able to find some local touristy strip mall to walk through and also a Chilis to have dinner at with another wedding giftcard! We drove down the coastline for quite a while as the sun was setting before finding the strip mall and it was gorgeous, we enjoyed this small, quaint part of Miami.

dinner @ Chili's on the balcony.

Sunday, December 9
This morning we woke up to nice sunny skies! We went out to the Everglades Safari Park and it was AWESOME! One of our top 5 favorite things from our vacation. We took an airboat ride where we saw a few big gators and a cute little baby gator, we watched a gator show, held a baby gator, and got within 4 feet of a 14 ft alligator with nothing in between us.
Random alligator facts we learned on our tour:
- they lay between 50-60 eggs
- of those 50-60 eggs, only 4-5 make it to adults
- most of the newly hatched alligators get eaten by fish, snakes, and other alligators
- they grow about 12 inches a year for the first 6 years
- you can train them like a dog
Because the whole place took about 2 hours we still had an afternoon to fill. We had picked up some coupons to different places around Miami from our hotel lobby that morning, we decided to check out Jungle Island and what a let down! WAY over priced and not nearly as neat as the zoo. They had a few little shows we watched which some were MUCH better than the others. I think Dr. Wasabi was our favorite. Just this funny guy bringing out tons of animals to crawl around the audience and then telling you all about them as well as dancing to funny songs. So it had some highlights, but definitely would not recommend it. After Jungle Island, we drove over to Miami beach and walked around there. There were hoards of people and loud music and craziness. We ate at a place called Bubba Gumps which was delicious but the service was crappy. And of course it was spendy since it was on the water. But again, the food was DELICIOUS! And then we topped it off with some dessert from our favorite ice cream parlor, Coldstone.