This day also followed two parts. First I went to two places in the Coral Gables area - Vezcaya and the Miami Science Center. Then I drove over a bridge to Miami Beach. One thing I learned from driving in Miami Beach was you shouldn't drive in a Crown Vic or anything similar in size.
First I went to Vezcaya. I actually parked in the parking lot of the Miami Science Center, but Vezcaya was just across the street. I had no problem getting in and used a little pamphlet to go around the building. It was all very impressive. This was built close to a hundred years ago but was made to look like it was older by decorating different rooms in different styles from eras hundreds of years apart. There were even pieces from European castles that had been imported to be wall coverings, or even a fire place in the new house. The grounds were very impressive also, although I didn't have time to look through all of them. There was a cement "boat" in the bay that people could walk out to, I guess during low tide. There was a lot of seaweed clogging the channel when I was there.
While I was looking around the gardens I saw an older woman laying on the floor of a building in the gardens. I asked her if she was alright. She was fine but was trying to get a sense of the place. She called herself a seer and gave me a reading. I enjoy these to a degree, not because I necessarily believe them, but they give me a different perspective. See told me about my spirit guides and said I should do something to help my stomach - flax seeds were recommended.
At this point I had to leave to get to the Science Center. I stopped by the gift shop to get a book on the place and walked over. The science center, I thought, was smaller than I expected. THere was the planetarium and then I only saw a couple of rooms with a satellite mapping exhibit and some kids experiments to explain physics. I waited around for the planetarium show. About a half hour before the show, I realized there were a lot more rooms including some snakes and spiders, a compressed air-powered car and various other things I don't remember. I had to rush through them to get back to the planetarium in time. In fact I got a little bit lost and couldn't figure out how to get back to the planetarium entrance. The show was on the history of the number of planets. I thought it would be trying to defend Pluto as a planet. Instead it explained about how the count of planets has gone up and down as we adjust what we call a planet. There was no final conclusion.
Then it was in the car and off to Miami Beach. The bridgeway was no problem but once I got onto the streets I saw that driving around was going to be a challenge. My first stop was the Wolfsonian, which was associated with a college or university in the area. It took me a bit of driving around before I found a parking structure - it cost $20. Every street seemed to have parallel parking and only two lanes of traffic. Add to that some big siteseeing busses and it was not fun to drive around in a big car.
The Wolfsonian was a small art museum containing mainly 20th century art up to about mid-century. This included a lot of industrial design, although the ground floor had an interesting metal statue, probably from the 1920s. I remember some pieces from various worlds fairs. There was also a floor of art connected with the London Underground, which has been going on for decades. As I said, it was a smallish museum with a few areas of specialization.
I drove over to my final stop and found another (much cheaper) parking structure. This was the Holocaust Memorial, which I always thought was peculiar to have in Miami Beach. I'll say more about it at the end of this post.
After the memorial I headed back to my hotel. It was too late to visit anything in central Miami. At this point I figured out that my debt card wasn't working. I called the number on the back and got it sorted out. When I got online, I saw that there had been an email sent earlier in the day. I was running low on cash and gas, although I still had my credit card. After that I went out for dinner and then called it a night.
The Holocaust Memorial was significantly more than I expected. When I found it, I saw the giant hand with all of the people on it, It wasn't until I went around the memorial that I found something very unexpected. If you went about halfway around from where you entered, there was an entryway into the area with the hand. The corridor had the names of various camps on the walls. When you got into the area where the arm was anchored, you saw many more individual statues of emaciated people. Some may have been dead, others were interacting with the people climbing on the arm. One was positioned to be viewed as you are walking down the corridor which sort of set the mood. It was rather shocking how the area was set up, probably to make the make the now abstract horror of the Holocaust more personal and individual.
The remainder of the memorial, outside the central area had plaques listing names of those remembered by people in the area and some history of the Nazi plans and construction of the campls. It was all very somber and left me moody on the drive back.
This was my last day in Florida. Since the flight was in the evening and I only had about 150 miles to drive to the airport, I planned to visit a few places along the way. In the town near where I was staying there was a museum/aquarium called the South Florida Museum. They had exhibits explaining the history of the area from the beginning of earth until now. There were exhibits on ancient life in the area, where florida was in all of the continental drifting and also the various pre-european cultures that were in the area.
Around lunch I had to head toward Orlando. Along the way, after about an hour, I exited the freeway to find a small college with the largest number of Frank Loyd Wright buildings in one area. There were lots of signs and a pamphlet to guide you to all of the buildings. There were also lots of covered walkways to admire. Unfortunately they were a bit short and made me a bit nervous. There was a pool with a nice fountain arrangement, called the Water Dome, that I was able to wait to see in action (it was on break when I arrived). All of this was in a quiet bucolic setting.
