Figuring Out the Public Transportation System in Miami

I was recently in Miami, Florida to visit a friend of mine who lives there. Before my trip when my friend and I were going back and forth trying to find dates that worked for both of us, after months of discussions, we finally found a week in April that worked. Mostly. She said she would still need to go in to work two of those days but I said, “No problem. I can just take an Uber or something one of those days and hang out at your pool the other day.”

Then I did a little research and found that to get an Uber from her house to the touristy parts of Miami was expensive. Like $35 each way before tip expensive. I thought it probably wasn’t worth all that plus the price of admission to a museum and lunch for myself and daughter. Even though she only lives about 20 miles from Miami Beach, which doesn’t seem that far to me, the price of a shared ride service seemed a bit much.

Undeterred, I began looking into public transportation and quickly got overwhelmed. It would be simple if my friend lived closer to downtown Miami or Miami Beach but because she was literally on the opposite end of where I wanted to go, yet still technically in Miami, it was complicated. Looking up directions with the handy website https://www.rome2rio.com, I saw my options: 1) I could take a taxi for around the same price as above-mentioned Uber, 2) I could rent a car (seemed silly to rent a car just to go to a museum), 3) I could walk there (yeah, I’m all about walking but even that’s too far for me), 4) I could take a combination of public transportation (bus, train for $1-3 each way), or 5) I could drive (my friend only has one car that she needed for work).

Photo of Metromover in downtown Miami. Photo credit Time Out

The only reasonable option to me seemed to be option 4. I saw there was a bus stop less than a mile from my friend’s house that I could walk to so I checked the bus schedule. There were two bus pickup times scheduled for the next morning that would work so I chose the later one, still not that late, at 8:30. If I missed that bus, though, there wasn’t another one scheduled until late in the afternoon, which wouldn’t work because I knew taking the bus would take around an hour just to get to downtown Miami simply because of the horrific traffic that is all-consuming there. https://www.miamidade.gov/global/transportation/home.page

I would basically take the bus all the way over to the very last stop, which would drop me off in downtown Miami, where I would just cross the street to get to the metro rail station at Government Center Train Station. I would ride the metro rail just a few stops until l reached the Metromover Station, which would take me across the street from the museum. Easy, right?

The night before my big adventure, I double-checked the route with Google Maps and after being given multiple options with the public transportation option, I chose what seemed like the “best” option, one that agreed with the Rome2rio option. I decided to follow Maps step-by-step route, which included all 52 bus stops along the way and hope for the best.

That morning before I left my friend’s house, I opened Maps, only to see the first bus was running almost an hour late, which meant the second bus was also running almost an hour late. No worries, it just gave me a little more time to eat breakfast before I’d have to leave for the short walk to the bus stop.

Sure enough, the bus arrived pretty close to what Google Maps said it would. Hoping I could just pay for my bus ticket and my daughter’s onboard (which is what it looked like from the website), we got on the bus and I asked if I could pay our fare with a credit card. The driver said yes and even told me my daughter was eligible for the reduced student fare, so I paid $2.50 for myself and $1.25 for her, and we both found seats. Fortunately our driver only stopped if someone was waiting at a stop, meaning we didn’t actually stop at all 52 bus stops. Unfortunately, traffic was insane and it was bumper-to-bumper traffic for quite some time.

After about an hour (which is what Maps predicted), we got off the bus and I followed the walking directions to the metro rail station at Government Center Train Station. It was a little confusing once inside the train station, but I followed the signage pointing the way to the direction we needed according to Maps and found where we needed to go. I wasn’t sure if I needed to buy a physical ticket at the kiosks or not so I asked someone working there, who said I could just swipe my credit card at the turnstile but that I would have to use a different card for myself than my daughter because you couldn’t pay for multiple rides simultaneously on the same card. No problem, I handed her a credit card to swipe, while I used another to swipe for myself.

We only took the metro a little ways before our stop, where we got on the Metromover. This station was conveniently across from where we got off the metro, and it was even free for all riders. The Metromover is just a smaller version of the metro, so instead of seats with dozens of seats and multiple train cars like the metro, the Metromover only fit maybe 10-15 people and was only one train car, with only a handful of seats (though I did see some with two or three train cars together). We rode the Metromover a couple of stops until we reached our stop and got off. The museum was conveniently across the street from the stop. We made it! I did the same thing on the way back to my friend’s home, only in reverse.

Downtown Miami

What I’ve learned about public transportation in an area you’re not familiar with: start with Rome2rio then double check on Google Maps if you’re taking public transportation. Go to the public transportation website of the city you’re visiting to further clarify the bus and/or train routes and educate yourself on the routes and times. Don’t be afraid to ask locals questions and for help. I’ve taken public transportation in big cities like New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and in other countries and inevitably the people I’ve asked for help have been immensely helpful. I’ve even been asked by locals if I needed help when I must have had a confused look on my face, and they happily helped me on my way.

Are you a pro at taking public transportation when you travel or are you overwhelmed by it all and prefer to just walk or take an Uber or taxi? Or are you like me and still figuring it out as you go but are by no means a pro? Do. you use rome2rio when you’re planning travel? Do you have any tips for using public transportation?

Happy travels!

Donna

Book Review- The Longest Race. Inside the Secret World of Abuse, Doping, and Deception on Nike’s Elite Running Team by Kara Goucher with Mary Pilon

It seems like so many elite runners are coming out with books lately and each one has their own unique story. This book by elite runner Kara Goucher is a page-turner filled with her personal running journey but also the scandal that happened when she was running with the Oregon Project. But first some background on the authors.

Kara Goucher is a three-time NCAA champion, two-time Olympian, silver medalist in the 10,000 meters at the 2007 World Championship, and podium finisher at the Boston and New York marathons. She currently is a running analyst for NBC Sports and cohost of two podcasts, the Clean Sport Collective which promotes fair play in sports and Nobody Asked Us with Des & Kara, with elite runner Des Linden.

Mary Pilon is a New York Times bestselling author of The Monopolists and The Kevin Show. She cowrote and cohosted the audio series Twisted: The Story of Larry Nassar and the Women Who Took Him Down. She previously covered sports at The New York Times and business at The Wall Street Journal. She is a story producer on BS High, HBO’s documentary about the Bishop Sycamore High School football scandal.

The Longest Race is written in chronological order of Goucher’s life and goes back to when she won her first race at the age of 6, a one-mile race her grandfather took her to. After that race, she was hooked on running. She briefly lived in New York and New Jersey until her father was killed by a drunk driver when she was three years old. Her mom moved back to Duluth, Minnesota along with Kara and her two sisters to be with family.

Goucher tells of her many wins on the cross country and track teams but also her difficulty to be recruited by a college after struggling with slowing times her senior year of high school. She ended up running at the University of Colorado where she met Adam Goucher, who she would end up marrying. Adam was an accomplished runner as well, with many track and cross country titles and an Olympian.

During her fifth year of college, Kara was the women’s NCAA cross country champion in the fall but didn’t do as well at the NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships in the spring due to a knee injury and feared no one would offer her a sponsorship to go pro. However, John Capriotti from Nike offered her a four-year contract, which she excitedly took.

Despite struggling with injuries, both Kara and Adam were offered the chance to move to Portland, Oregon to be a part of the newly formed Oregon Project coached by Alberto Salazar, a legend in the running world. He had earned many running titles including Olympian in 1980 and 1984 but his most famous race was the “Duel in the Sun” showdown where he out kicked Dick Beardsley in the last 50 yards of the 1982 Boston Marathon and set a new Boston record just before he collapsed and was rushed to the hospital for an IV drip of six liters of saline solution.

Goucher tells the story how Salazar treated the runners on the Oregon Project as family and was a father figure to herself and Adam, and seemingly the other runners as well. But little by little, Salazar’s shady side surfaced. Goucher mentions sexually charged comments made by her coach and other men working for Nike, her coach’s excessive drinking, and even massages given by Salazar himself, despite the fact that he was not a trained massage therapist and Nike had no shortage of those on staff.

Those massages did indeed turn completely inappropriate on two separate occasions, according to Goucher, when she and her coach flew to races in other countries, basically when his fingers traveled a bit too far. She was so shocked she thought it must have been a mistake and neither said nor did anything at the time to anyone. It was only years later that she admitted to others what had happened.

In addition to inappropriate comments and behavior mentioned in the book, there were several times when Salazar did some questionable at best things when it came to athletes on the Oregon Project and certain medications not sanctioned by the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) and World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). It wasn’t until 2014, after the Gouchers had left the Oregon Project that a reporter with ProPublica reached out to Adam with suspicions about the Oregon Project and doping. What followed turned out to be an enormous scandal covering athletes from all over the world.

Many runners were stripped of former medals due to doping, while others, like Kara were being upgraded. Although Kara had been awarded the bronze medal at the 2007 World Championship in Osaka, the silver medalist was found guilty of unauthorized drug use, meaning Kara was then the silver medalist. An anonymous whistleblower from within the International Association of Athletics Federations provided British and German journalists with files on 12,000 blood samples from 5,000 athletes who had competed between 2001 and 2012. It went deeper than doping. IAAF president Lamine Diack, along with other IAAF officials, were charged with money laundering and corruption.

There are many more details covered in the book, too many for me to discuss here. In fact, I found the book so accurately detailed at first I thought it was unusual, until I remembered the intense interviews the Gouchers underwent when they were interviewed by the FBI and other groups before the doping scandal with Salazar and others broke. It was obvious Kara kept careful notes of everything, no doubt in her running journals but also private journals, as she mentions in the book.

In the end, this book just made me sad for the sport and how tarnished it became in the 2000’s when the scandal broke. It also made me sad that Kara suffered in silence for so many years and how she had to endure the inappropriate comments not only from Salazar but other male executives at Nike, and her poor treatment by the company especially during her pregnancy, which she details in the book. I should note that both Kara and Adam Goucher were not found guilty of any inappropriate use of performance-enhancing drugs or any other wrongdoing during any investigation. Alberto Salazar, on the other hand, was suspended for doping allegations then barred for life from coaching by SafeSport for sexually assaulting an athlete (Kara, although she was not personally named in the report).

That being said, I did find the book intriguing and found the pages flying by as I read them. Kara Goucher’s story is a unique one, and one that I would like to say didn’t happen to other runners, but two other female runners from the Oregon Project were also effected negatively by Salazar. Mary Cain came forward and said that Salazar shamed her for her weight in front of other Oregon Project team members and Amy Yoder Begley said Salazar told her he was kicking her off the team because she had “the biggest butt on the starting line.”

I can only hope that because of the courage of these women to come forward, do the hard thing, and speak up, things can only get better in the sport. Unfortunately this kind of thing probably happens more than anyone realizes. When the runners are pros and their career and salary are at stake, it’s difficult if not seemingly impossible to speak up against their coaches, especially ones with male-dominated companies like Nike.

Kara Goucher says she received death threats and endured negative comments when she came forward about Salazar. Despite all of the heartache running has brought her, she says she still is in love with running and is hopeful things will get better as long as people refuse to remain quiet when it comes to doping or sexual abuse. I would like to be hopeful as well and think this book sets a precedent for the ability to be more open and be able to speak up.

Have you read this book? If so, what did you think? Is it on your list of books to read?

Happy running!

Donna

Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables, Florida

I’m a huge fan of botanical gardens and try to visit one everywhere I travel, if possible. When I told my friend who I was visiting in Miami how much I loved botanical gardens, she said she had just the place for us to go, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden. She had a membership because she loved it so much and had been many times so she was happy to show me around.

Where to begin? First off, I should note I can see why this garden was voted best botanical garden in North America by USA Today and best outdoor attraction by Miami New X Times. I’ve been to so many botanical gardens all over the world and this is one of my new favorites.

The fact that even though I had been to Miami several times before but never been to this garden is beyond me, but better late than never. The thoughtful layout of the gardens is apparent, as well as how lovingly-tended the grounds are. Even though it was 80 degrees out with high humidity the day I was there, many parts of the garden are shaded so it was quite comfortable walking around.

I wouldn’t have thought a botanical garden near Miami, Florida would be capable of having such diversity of plants and flowers but I was wrong. Granted, the key word here is “tropical,” since everything here grows in a tropical environment. Of course there are palm trees and a palmetum, a fern glade, plants from the Caribbean, a children’s garden, a butterfly garden and conservatory, arid and succulent garden, plants found in Madagascar, a rainforest, plus 11 lakes and 7 pools, including the Sibley Victoria Pool, the Tropical Plant Conservatory and Rare Plant House Pools, Amphitheater pool, the Sunken Garden pool and waterfall, and more. Between my friend’s iPhone, my camera, and my daughter’s camera, the three of us amassed a crazy number of photos and it was difficult to choose which ones to include here.

Some of my favorite areas of the garden are the butterfly garden, with the most densely packed area of butterflies I’ve ever seen, the rainforest with literally thousands of orchids of all colors, sizes, and shapes, and the tropical plant conservatory with some of the most unique flowers and plants in the world. We were able to walk around and see every area of the garden in a couple or so hours. At 83 acres with just over 2 miles of paved walking paths, if you’re limited on your feet, you may want to take the tram.

The tram tour is free but it is first-come, first-served and weather dependent, and even though it was operating, we decided to skip it and just walk around on our own. All of the plants and trees were well-marked with their common and biological name, which I appreciated, as I have a bizarre memory for plants’ names and like to expand it when I can (even though I can’t remember what groceries to buy without a list every time).

In addition to a variety of plants at the garden, there are of course the butterflies but also nearly 200 species of birds have been reported, according to https://ebird.org/hotspot/L127426, where people self-report bird spotting. Plus, there are fish in many of the water areas and six varieties of lizards have been reported. I personally spotted four different types of lizards so I have no doubt there are more since I couldn’t have possibly seen them all.

Check the event calendar before you go because there are a variety of activities at the garden throughout the year including lectures, yoga, dog walks, cooking classes, bird watching, and art classes, just to name a few. There is also a cafe, The Glasshouse Cafe by Le Basque that serves soups, sandwiches, wraps, smoothies, and drinks.

Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden is open daily from 10 am to 5 pm. Tickets range from $24.95 for adults to $11.95 for children ages 6-17 and parking is free. Promotions and discounts are available, just check the website for a full list: https://fairchildgarden.org/?_gl=1%2A90sbbq%2A_ga%2ANDUxMDQwMjMzLjE2ODE0MjQzMTk.%2A_gid%2AMTA5NDE1MjcwMy4xNjgxNDI0MzE5

Do you also enjoy botanical gardens? Have you been to this one? What is one of your favorite botanical gardens?

Happy travels!

Donna