24th February

Hi all.  We had an uneventful flight to Miami. Fortunately the taxi to Heathrow kept going long enough  to get us to Heathrow, but we will never know if it made it back to Leicestershire as it was sounding ropey. The A380 was pretty full, including premium economy.  We were nevertheless well looked after, although Ben's after dinner whisky never appeared!
The old system of filling landing cards for immigration has been superceded with a room full of electronic registration terminals on arrival.  We were lucky to find an unoccupied one and managed the process quite painlessly. We cleared customs and picked up our bags quite quickly.  We had to take the transit sytem to get to the car rental office and again were quickly furnished with a pretty new Hyundai Santafe Sport SUV.  Thereafter we spend about 40 minutes trying to get on to the correct road out of Miami - and that was with a satnav!  The rest of the trip was uneventful and we eventually checked in at our hotel at about 11:30 pm (USA time), feeling pretty tired. Ben had already booked a round of golf near Fort Myers for Wednesday so we didn't get much respite after the journey. The forecast was for high winds and thunderstorms in the area, but in the end we were just playing the 18th hole when the heavens opened and we were soaked mainly getting wet while we put the clubs away in the car.

The course was not in very good condition, quite wet, but we enjoyed the freedom of being able to play golf in the warm as the temperature was 80 degrees when we started- it has since cooled down after the rain, but we are hoping that we will not see any more rain while we are here. We ate out in the evening at a large busy Italian restaurant where we were reminded of the loudness of the American people.