Friday photos- Mermaids (&mermen!) and a music festival for a pre- spring break

A look back at the week, Monday thru Friday, through photos

Monday was as good a day as ever to be getting ready to leave cold and dreary southern Ohio for warm and sunny southern Florida! On Monday, it snowed a little bit (nothing stuck to the ground) and was darn, tootin’ cold all day. Was happy at the thought of a pre- spring break trip and worrying about things like getting sun burned.

Tuesday morning, the first day of spring, Alyssa and I left for the airport, destination Fort Lauderdale, Florida!! We had snacks, our Kindles, Alyssa had one physical book, Starbucks, etc. and Alyssa even got a window seat in the plane so, winning! Of course the biggest win was heading to Florida :).

My free drink on flight. I’m *kind of* a big deal on the airline we flew on. (Just kidding, I just have an airline credit card that entitles me to a soft free drink on every flight. It makes me feel like a VIP...)

Why Fort Lauderdale, why pre spring break? Well, it all came down to money (mostly). Alyssa loves the sun and being out and in it so we knew we wanted to go to Florida and somewhere south to increase the probability of the weather being warm/ hot. I started looking into flight prices for various mid- to southern Florida destinations and realized that we could fly into Fort Lauderdale fairly cheaply. We went the week before our spring break because the flights were a lot cheaper the week before. With Alyssa being a senior in high school/ already admitted to college/ scholarshipped, etc., she really just needs to pass her classes this semester so attendance is not quite as important as it was in other years (though she does want college credit for her AP classes so she has an incentive to not miss too much instruction in those classes). 

I found a nice hotel on the beach that was close to a lot of restaurants. I didn’t want to deal with renting a car so I knew we needed a place with a good location. 

Then a couple of weeks ago, I started reading about Miami Beach wanting to avoid some of the out of control events that occurred last year during spring break. The city decided to increase the cost to park at public beach parking lots and to limit the amount of time that public beaches were open.

Miami Beach’s website announced that it was breaking up with spring break.

 

But Fort Lauderdale did not break up with spring break. A perennial spring break destination for the college kids, with Miami taking tangible steps to reduce the number of spring breakers, many would be Miami spring breakers decided to head just thirty miles north to Laudy.

This picture that accompanied the article about Fort Lauderdale made me twitchy. So.Many.People. on that beach. 

Oh dear, reading about the influx of spring breakers in Fort Lauderdale due to Miami Beach making its beaches less attractive to the college kids and feeling dread therein about going to crowded Fort Lauderdale public beaches, I made a change to our hotel.

Though I had a hotel reserved that seemed high enough in price to deter college spring breakers, I was not assuaged that it would be enough to keep us away from crowds of drunk college students! I found two hotels in For Lauderdale Beach that had private beaches for their patrons. I chose one that was in better walking distance to restaurants and with a few strokes of the Chromebook, I canceled one reservation and committed to paying a bit more for another place with a private beach.

I LOVED the beach portion of where we stayed! We have stayed at private beaches locations and non private ones and private is for sure my preference. I noticed, when booking the hotel that I did, that there was an almost inordinate amount of sand between the hotel and the beach. I thought that was kind of too bad since it meant that it would be a longer walk to the beach.

How naive my “fears” were of the abundance of sand. For what does a large swath of beach call for but a MUSIC FESTIVAL on the beach? The festival, the Tortuga, isn’t until later in April. But huge undertakings were underway to create temporary structures. Some of these structures construction were visible right outside our balcony- the ocean view for which I paid extra indeed showed the ocean, from a distance. In the forefront, though, we witnessed a lot of building activity. It wouldn’t have been so bad except that it was loud. Trucks carrying pallets of items for the festival constantly made that high pitched “beep beep” sound. We heard that a lot while on the beach. Oh well. What are you going do?

I took this picture while standing on our balcony one morning. 

This was the view several hours later. A lot of work was done in this area! This was one fairly small area that was being worked on for the festival. It was the closest to us and our hotel.

This was the view our last full day in Florida.

Info about the festival-

Mermaids and mermen also played a role in our unique pre- spring break getaway!

And not just in ornaments that you could buy in beach stores... The hotel that we stayed at had mermaid shows in one area. We demurred on attending as you can imagine! The place where the mermaid shows were was decorated to look like a boat. 

A text from our hotel about an upcoming show. Attending was a hard NO!

I will post more pictures and have more commentary next week- wanted to get this FP post up this weekend :).