This blog will talk about my trip to Florida and the things I did in a week long to hopefully give others an idea for what to do in a week long trip to Florida. I went on this trip with a big group of 21 people.

Day 1 - Travel Day

First day was a travel day where I was traveling from my home of Bay Area → Fort Lauderdale international. I was flying Southwest and had a stop in Chicago Midway airport

Thankfully my layover in MDW was only 1.5 hours and there was a priority pass lounge that I could get into with my credit card. There was a long wait time and they said it would take 50-60 minutes but I got into the lounge in around 30 minutes. Pro tip, search on Google for the lounge waitlist QR codes so you can be on the waitlist earlier (See this reddit thread for MDW airport QR code)

I landed in Fort Lauderdale around 10:00 PM and got to the hotel by 11:00 PM. I stayed at a hotel close to the airport for the night where the rest of my group was meeting up.

Day 2 - Keys Travel Day

Christmas day!! On this day we woke up around 8:00 AM and had a quick breakfast at the hotel buffet. After breakfast we started our drive to the keys. We stopped for lunch at a Thai restaurant as it was one of the only restaurants open as this was Christmas day. Otherwise the drive was fun and the highway was very scenic with open ocean on both sides.

The AirBnB we stayed at was very interesting as it was an extremely colorful house. There was honestly something a lil creepy about the place but it was a wonderful stay and accommodated our big group well.

Once we got to the AirBnB we were pretty exhausted and took the rest of the day easy. We ended up playing games at night and doing the gift exchange as part of our groups secret santa.

Day 3 - Sandbar Excursion

After having an early breakfast the main attraction of this day was Sebago Sandbar Excursion tour. The tour was ~4 hours long in a chill lounge boat that my group thoroughly enjoyed. The boat also had an open bar. Once we got to the Sandbar we were able to get off the boat and walk around. The water was slightly cold initially but you can very quickly get acclimatized to it.

Once the sandbar tour ended we went to Kermit’s Key Lime pie shop which is a well known shop. TBH I thought the pie was mid and would not go there again. Afterwards we saw sunset by Mallory Square.

After sunset we were walking around trying to find something to eat but our big group of 21 could not come to consensus on where to eat. It was ~ 1 hour of walking around and all of us were hangry as we had skipped lunch before we gave up and just decided to DoorDash pizzas and pastas to the AirBnB. We ordered 8 pizzas and 8 pastas from Onlywood and everything was finished clean in 20 minutes.

Day 4 - Leaving the Keys

On this day we checked out of the AirBnB by 10:00 PM and made our way out of the keys towards Miami. We stopped by downtown key west again to see the Southernmost Point of t...tinental U.S.A. landmark. The lines for getting a picture with the landmark were really long but I didn’t think it was anything special and could be skipped.

On the way out of the keys we first stopped at Bahia Honda state park. This park had a lot of nice beaches with white sand and calm waves. Lots of people were swimming in the beach but we had not showed up in correct attire for a swim. We walked around the parks in the park for a little bit and had a nice picnic at some of the tables.

Our next stop on the drive back was at Robbie's of Islamorada. There was a small gift shopping area and the main attraction here was feeding tarp fish. We were going to do it but after seeing a Reddit thread with a man almost being eaten by the fish we decided to skip it.

The next stop was a Wawa gas station. We stopped here because I had recently seen a Youtube video about the Wawa brand and wanted to see the Wawa experience because from my understanding the food was great (for gas station food) and had a cult like following on the internet. I ended up getting a panini and enjoyed it. Overall the Wawa was cool but Buccees on top.

After filling up gas we finally made it to downtown Miami. Having learnt from the dinner disaster last night we had made a reservation at Casa Cubana in Miami South beach. The parking situation in South beach is atrocious and it took us nearly 30 minutes to find parking. Even most of the parking garages were full. The reservation was at 9:00 for 21 people but we were not seated until 9:45 PM and the group was split up. When the reservation was made we were promised to be seated together. The food itself was great but I felt the waiter very much misguided us with the portion sizes and we ended up ordering a lot more food than actually needed.

After dinner we walked around South beach area for 10 minutes and started driving to our AirBnb in Dania Beach. We reached the Airbnb at around 1:00 AM.

Day 5 - Everglades

After sleeping late the night before we had to get up early today as we had booked boat tours in the Everglades. After a quick breakfast on the balcony overlooking the beach we made our way to Everglades National Park Adventures. We were on the boat by 11:30 AM and the tour was around 3 hours long.

We saw lots of birds and wildlife on the boat and the highlight of the ride was seeing dolphins. We had seen a group of Dolphins with the boat

After this boat ride we had a small break before our next boat ride which was at 4:00 PM. We were eating theplas at the picnic benches in front of the Captain Jack's Airboat Tours. To kill time we walked on the boardwalk which was cool as it was in a swampy setting

The Airboat tour itself was fun. We were able to see parts of the everglade the previous larger boat was not able to reach. We went down small canals where we saw more wildlife. By far the coolest thing we saw on this boat was the alligators where our captain took us very close and the alligator was underneath our boat.

The last part of our everglades tour was an alligator show at the Animal Sanctuary & Alligator Park. The show was given by a crazy florida man who was quite literally wrestling a live alligator and putting his hands inside the alligators mouth. I was starting to understand the florida man memes at this point 🙂. At the end of the show we were even able to hold the baby alligators!

After this we made our way back to the AirBnB and had a chill dinner at Cava

Day 6 - Chill day

After a hectic past 3 days we took this day to just chill and enjoy our AirBnb on Dania beach. I swam in the beach and it was extremely pleasant. The water was warm (way better than SF Bay area beaches) and the white sand was fine grained. Top tier beach and would come back here again

After rotting for a majority of the day we went to Brickell City Ceter in Miami and walked around. It was a lively shopping center and there were lots of stores and restaurants to see. We had dinner at Cava and ended up walking around the waterfront for sometime

We ended the night at the Hard Rock Casino where the building was in the shape of a giant guitar. I mainly stayed at the poker room playing 1/2 NL and got triggered at the end. The very last hand I played I was holding 9/10DD and it was raised 20 pre flop. There were 4 people and I was closing action so I decided to call. Flop came QJX. Main villain bet 30 dollars and there were two callers including me. Turn came 8 and I made my ST and immediately went all in. Villain tanked for sometime but ended up making the call. The river came 8. Unfortunately the incompetent dealer dealt the river card too early and did not give opportunity for the last player in the hand to finish playing his hand. The river card was voided and the player ended up folding. The new river card was a Q and villain was holding Q8 making FH (QQQ88). I was flabbergasted but I guess that’s poker for you

Day 7 - Jet Skiing

This was the last full day we had before we left Florida. We didn’t do much in the morning but in the afternoon we went jet skiing at Jet Ski Ford Lauderdale. Jet skiing was in a canal and we had an hour on it. It was fun to ride and we had a guide with us the whole time. The jet skis went surprisingly fast but thankfully I did not fall off.

We ended the trip by going to the local brewery, Lauderale. The brewery had a nice vibe with lots of great beers. We ended up getting a couple of samplers and 2 beers each. After the brewery we hit Jaxson’s Ice Cream and got some late night ice creams for the AirBnB

The End.