Day One

After getting up at the crack of dawn, Julia's Dad brought us to the airport.

Because, we are little Type-A's we checked in 3 hour before Boarding time and then hung out at the gate.

Then we spent 10 hours aboard our awesome A-380, watching Fast&Furious 5 and Something Borrowed, eating *yummy* chicken and pasta and Bambi Goulash. No - not joking they had deer meat as food on the plane. 

When we had finally landed, went through immigration and survived a trillion customs and passport inspections, we made our way to the rental car station and got the first real view of this:

Hello Miami!!!

Then our next challenge was to navigate traffic in our HUGE SUV. H-U-G-E!!! We need to take a pic of it today and post it. Just so you know, space problems we will have not.
We found our hotel with only minimal problems and checked in. We were kinda suprised because it is really clean and spacious.

And because you don't experience Miami while staying in your motel, we decided to hit the road again.
First things first: Find a publix, get something to eat and to drink. Then find a t-mobile to get a prepaid card for my iPhone. The WiFi at the hotel is working just fine, but we want to be online alllll the time!
Sounds easy enough... and finding Publix was easy. But the prepaid card... ugh. We went from T-Mobile, to at&t to Best Buy and finally ended up here

and I met the love of my life - Rene from T-Mobile who finally sold me a prepaid card with unlimited texting, calls and web. And then we even managed to get some at&t guy at the mall to make the regular SIM into a micro SIM to make it fit my iPhone. I heart you, nameless at&t guy!!
Julia is trying to find her own Rene in the next days because she just found out that sms is not working. Can phone but not write sms.



On our way from store to store we noticed a little light in our dash board, and Julia quickly consulted our handy user manual to determine that we apparently had low tire pressure.
Okay, not awesome, but no reason to panic, right? Off to the gas station we drove. However, at the first station, nobody spoke english and at the second, nobody could help us.
We finally just went to an auto repair shop and totally worked the "I'm a poor German girl and my car is broken and I have no idea what to doooo, hellllp me!!". And it worked. Awesome Tire-Guy checked all our tires and fixed the problem. We love, Tire-Guy. Even though you told us like 3 times that we are brave, really brave girls, to be making that trip. Um, not what we wanna hear while we are still in panic-mode.


Then after all these success stories, we finally hit the expressway towards Miami Beach and Juli finally broke out her awesome camera to take some pics.

The late afternoon light was just awesome and the skyline is great.

And then we saw it - The Atlantic Ocean! It was almost 8 pm by the time we got there, the sun was setting but the water was still soooo warm! We forgot our tiredness (and that it was well past midnight for us, German Time) and enjoyed the beach! People were still in the water even with the moon in the sky. Take that baltic sea!!

And of course, thanks to Rene, I was able to let the FB-community take part in our happiness.

Then we headed back to the hotel, stopped at Burger King for dinner (they had no salad... how is that possible?!) and dropped dead in our Queen Size Bed.

As first nights go, this one was kinda sucky. We have a bad jetlag and were totally over-tired. Let's hope for a better night in Orlando!
The sun is not up yet but it is already warm outside - great weather. We are now off to Wal Mart for some shopping and then up to Delray Beach to meet our friend Beth for lunch.