72 Hours: Miami
I’m Alive is a series about traveling to 14 cities to film a two-and-a-half minute YouTube video. We spent 72 hours in each city. Miami was our eighth city, which led to a detour to Key West, where we couldn’t swim in a shark cage.
That one was really upsetting. We were trying to find water adventures, which led us to calling Miami Shark Tours because they offered full-on cage diving with sharks. Most of the other companies just offered boat tours or otherwise, not actual shark diving. The disappointing piece is that they had moved to West Palm Beach and no longer offered tours in the Keys. That was unfortunate. Given this information, we took our Car2Go on probably one of the longest round-trip drives yet. Our first morning in Miami was spent driving the 3~ hours to the Florida Keys to get a taste of the rural, salty island experience. We sought out adventures right off the bat.
Things kicked off with a phone call to Sunset Water Sports Key West. The people were friendly and completely stoked with how far we’d driven Car2Go to have adventure time. They recommended one of their outward locations on a rural beach where we could get up the same day. After Nic chased a huge Komodo dragon-looking lizard through the parking lot, some island people took care of our paperwork and got us onto a launch boat within a few minutes. We were off with some random bartenders from Baltimore and vacationers from elsewhere, many of which were terrified. The pilot explained to us that the waivers meant nothing and that “you can never sign away your rights.” He then explained that if we died, it wouldn’t matter anyway. After watching a couple of said terrified people scream in horror before going up, then laugh and scream in joy on the way down, it was our turn. We got locked in, readied the cameras, and then shot off into the water. We were dragged and splashed into the beautiful blue below us before taking off on an upward journey of what I’d estimate to be around 1000 feet up. That may be a completely inaccurate measurement, but who really cares? It was peaceful, beautiful, quiet, and I couldn’t even feel myself moving. We talked about our adventure to date, Car2Go, and all the amazing things we’d seen but couldn’t really even process. There may have even been a couple of fish to top off this serene moment. Before we knew it, we were getting reeled in by a rambunctious ship mate and getting wooed at by the bartenders. All-in-all, a nice afternoon was had, and another adventure was captured. We headed back to HQ for the night after exploring the local boardwalk.
After filming some b-roll, driving by Ernest Hemingway’s house, and seeing the 90-miles to Cuba sign, we’d covered the basics. The drive back to Miami was sun-chapped and awesome. Car2Gos get amazing gas mileage, by the way.
We explored a number of other popular (and unpopular) Miami attractions throughout the rest of our trip. It even rained in our hotel’s outside courtyard at one point, and people just stood at the bar with their umbrellas.
Some noteworthy places were Villa Vizcaya, various places on Key Biscayne, and the many incredible people-watching opportunities in South Beach.
We captured a lot of awesome footage and really tested the limits of the Car2Go’s boundary situation. All in all, it was really nice to be in warm weather exploring a large, complex city — we only saw a fraction of all the things going on there, though.
Our adventure continued in Los Angeles.