>>Scrapbook: Miami/Disney

We spent New Year's Eve at Coconut Grove, where there are a whole bunch of restaurants, clubs, and bars.  Most of our time was spent at Fat Tuesday's, where we stocked up on yards of beer and overpriced photo keychains. 

I made my final withdrawal of 1998 just in time to order my New Year's Toast beverages at Fat Tuesday's!

When we woke up on the first day of 1999, it was time for a scavenger hunt in search of various tailgating and game-viewing goods, such as orange and blue face paint.  We didn't find them at the True Value hardware store.

Luckily I had planned ahead and brought my last 2 remaining Otto face tattoos!  Eventually we did find an arts-and-crafts store that happened to have some orange and blue paint.  It was kind of strange that the face paint was so hard to find, considering that both teams had the same colors...

Next we headed over to South Beach to catch some rays! 

As Will Smith put it, "South Beach bringin' the heat..."  We spent most of the daylight hours here on the water.  At first we had some trouble keepin' all our cars together and looking for a good place to park but luckily some random guy told us all we needed to know over the CB.  Mostly we hung out in front of a posh new hotel on Collins Avenue that we dubbed "our hotel" because we were pretty much in front of it more than any of its guests.  I think the staff actually thought we were staying there, the Valet guys offered to get our cars and no one complained when we partied on their beach at night.

We took time off from "our hotel" on South Beach to prepare for the main event... and after a few free tasty beverages in our hotel lounge (well, for the two of us of legal age, that is) we were ready to pack up our newly acquired cooler, food, mini-TV, and body paint and get ready for some football!

Finally it came time for the big game!  We spent half the day trying to figure out how to get our stuff to the stadium when we realized parking nearby was out of the question.  A few of the guys went over and found a very expensive spot a few blocks away and the rest of us walked from our hotel.  We camped out in the parking lot with our portable TV but by the end of the first quarter we were all drunk enough so that we didn't feel the pain of what was happening to our team.  We concentrated our efforts on painting cheers on each other's bodies and cookin' up hot dogs for random passers-by who in turn gave us about 50 free tickets to the game.  A bunch of us went in for the end of the game to join the SU marching band in celebrating a crappy game but amazing overall experience.

When it was time to say goodbye to Miami, some of us moved on to Orlando for a few days of Disney!

Me, Ike, Lou, and Mike were pretty psyched about the Mini-golf directly across the street from our hotel!  You can see by the score that I am the king of the mini-golf world!!

Ike had someone's left over 2-day pass so we took turns buying Disney tickets!  We spent 2 days at Disney and Epcot.  It was pretty cold so luckily it wasn't too crowded and we didn't waste a lot of time waiting in lines!

Unfortunately we didn't get to Universal or any of the other parks but we did get to a restaurant where Ike was offered a job.

Diary of a Road Trip