One Last Night

After renting a car, and causing Julie to spill half a bottle of Gatorade on herself we quickly went down to Soute Pointe Park before heading North on #1 taking the scenic route to Ft. Lauderdale -- cruising the North Beach and its beautiful homes, passing Bal Harbor and its designer shops and through Sunny Isles on to Hollywood/Ft. Lauderdale.  Arriving in Ft. Lauderdale we still hadn't booked a hotel but had been eyeing the Ritz as it's part of the FHR program with Amex PTS but our newfound friend Rizzario highly recommend the W and it's funky design and uber-cool stairway through the pool. As we're still in the good books with SPG it sounded like a good idea.

Stairway through pool, cool yet creepy?

As it's off-season and we were arriving on a Sunday night SPG Platinum hooked us up with a pretty sweet upgrade to a Marvelous Suite, which admittedly was pretty marvelous.  Wrap around expansive terrace (4+ patio doors), Bang Olufsen sound systems, and just an overall awesomeness.  We took a video as we were quite happy; video here.  We arrived in time for the 'pool party' which generally just means a DJ instead of a playlist.  The pool was quite busy for a Sunday in off-season fortunately we were able to sneak a spot around the corner from the action.

The bartender kindly informed us they were offering half off bottles of vodka although we went for some fail-safe champagne. After lounging around until the sun disappeared we headed back to our condo and got ready for dinner -- oh and Julie took a nap on the terrace.

Nap time.

Out on the prowl for dinner we realized that there isn't much action near our hotel so we hit up a bistro and grabbed a pizza and caprese salad to go.  Initial plan was to eat on our terrace with the in-room sound system jamming but there's no lighting on the terrace so we stayed in..  After dinner I challenged Julie to a race down in the pool which she accepted.

On your marks, get set, go!

The pool was a bit chilly but we had a good time monkeying around the pool area.  While we didn't go down to the "living room" two floors down there was a cool sitting area with a massive fire pit (one also on the pool deck).

A fish in the pond.

Since the pool was chilly we ended our outing relatively early so that we could log a few KMs in the morning.