We should have taken the shuttle bus, which goes right to the Tri-Rail station, but I didn't know where to catch it, so we took a regular bus. When we got off, the driver told us to go back and across the street, so that's what we did. Walked a couple of blocks down a side street before we found a couple of people who could tell us how to get to the Tri-Rail station. We had to walk all the way back to the main street (Broward), turn right, and go around past the bowling alley. We finally found the station. Just had time to buy our tickets and get to the platform before the train arrived.
We had left rather late, so even though the train only took half an hour, it was nearly noon by the time we got to Miami. They've changed the transit system since the last time we were here. Instead of going to downtown Miami, we ended up somewhere in the boonies and had to transfer to another train to get close to where we wanted to go. We didn't know how far it was to Dinner Key, so we took a bus. That turned out to be a mistake. The station was only four or five blocks from the boatyard. We had to walk as far from where we got off the bus as we would have walked from the station, but even though we had a street map of Miami, that wasn't at all clear. There was a Burger King across from the station that we didn't see until we were on the bus. By the time we got to the waterfront, we were famished, and there weren't any inexpensive places to eat down there, so we walked back to Burger King.
Felt better after eating, but I discovered I no longer had the street map. I figured I must have left it in the women's restroom at City Hall, where I'd laid it down to wash my hands.
We went to the Dinner Key Boatyard and walked around. Instead of a Travel-lift, they have a crane. We've never been hauled out by a crane before, so we were a little dubious, but there were a lot of other cruising sailboats on the hard. Roy talked with a couple of people, and they seemed satisfied with the yard, but they weren't liveaboards. We went in to the big, old building that used to be a hangar for Pan-Am clippers and looked at the restrooms and showers. They were absolutely the worst we've seen anywhere. Old and dirty and rusty and decrepit. Much worse than any in Mexico. We talked with the two guys who run the place. They're Cubans, who scarcely speak English. In the course of the conversation, I realized I had phoned this place last week under a different name. If I had known it was the same place I had phoned, we wouldn't have wasted our time coming down here, because I'd already rejected it on the basis of the conversation. Even though the City of Miami owns and operates the yard, they do little more than provide space. All the work is farmed out to contractors, even the hauling. We'd have had to pay one contractor to haul us and another to do the pressure wash. The haulout would have cost $200 each way, and the wash $90. That's nearly $500 just to get in and out of the water! Outrageous!
We were going to check another yard while we were down there, but we waited so long for a bus that it was getting too late in the day, so we headed back to Fort Lauderdale. It was dark by the time we got there, so we were glad we hadn't spent any more time in Miami.
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