Thursday October 7th

[22:17 EDT]

A comfortable night and a nice breakfast in the hotel. However, as soon as we were back in our room, it was time to pack up our stuff and get in back into the car - fortunately, the boot of this Acadia is pretty large - Linda was thankful for that at least!

Before heading off to our next stop, Naples, we decided to take a short drive down into Miami proper and have a look at the South Beach area. Most of the drive was uneventful, save for the fact that very high tides have caused some flooding in the parts of Miami where the water comes right up next to the roads. We happened to stumble across one of these roads.

In some places it was quite deep.

And it stretched for about a mile - right up to the next intersection

But as we drove on, we left the water behind. Eventually we turned around and headed back up to the I95, stopping first for a quick look around the Aventura Mall. From there we headed West down Alligator Alley towards Naples. Although the road is pretty bleak most of the time and it's definitely a road for cruise control, we made it in good time over to our second stop on our trip, the Cove Inn in the historic part of Naples.

The hotel sits on the edge of the Naples marina and this is the view from our balcony.

We decided to have a quick look around the place, mainly to scope out where we are supposed to go tomorrow for out bike ride around Naples that we booked a while ago. We found our meeting place easily enough - indeed it's walkable from our hotel.

We them went further and found the beach and its pier.

Finally, we walked back to a nearby pub for some food and walked back in the semi-dark to the hotel. It's odd that although it's late at night, it is still very warm outside. Before we got back to the hotel, we made one quick dash over to a nearby Publix (Sainsburys) to stock up on breakfast provisions as we have DIY breakfasts for the next couple of days.