Travel Blog

We took Brightline to Miami yesterday, using the free tickets we’d received from a company representative during Miami Art Week. (We’d been enjoying a jazz concert on Flagler Street when a woman appeared handing out postcards with a barcode.)

The Fort Lauderdale station was unexpectedly busy at 10 in the morning, and included a lot of children enjoying their school holidays. At least two people were headed to a cruise ship, taking a revived form of transportation to a threatened one.

The train was 35 minutes late, possibly because of the accident a few hours earlier. South Floridians, please stop driving onto the tracks when a train is coming. When we finally boarded, we were told we could sit anywhere. We took two seats on the east side, facing south. (A surprising number of people sat in the first seats they came to, despite the fact that they faced in the wrong direction.) Our car was a little less than half full.

And soon we were gliding past familiar sights – 2^nd Street, the New River, Tarpon River Brewing – places I glide past on my evening bike rides. The airport was a disappointment, as we were hemmed in on both sides by stationary freight trains. We saw the back of Dania Beach before getting a three-second view of downtown Hollywood.

Warehouses, a golf course, a tidy neighborhood of ranch houses before another back – this time of the MiMo District. The apartment buildings of Midtown, their balconies only a few feet from the train, reminded me for some reason of Italy. A long exquisite mural – Wynwood – and then the staffs of downtown condos, including Zaha Hadid’s masterwork, rose above a graffitied warehouse emblazoned with the word WOKE.

We exited the station, caught the Metro Mover to Brickell City Centre, had lunch, and took the Metro Mover back to the station, hoping to get an earlier train home. (We’d been to Miami before.) The gates wouldn’t open when we scanned our tickets; a Brightline worker told us that to change our tickets we had to see the representative at the counter.

He told us the next train, the 3:48, was full. But he’d get us on the 4:48. This seemed odd, since the latter was closer to rush hour. “That’s true,” he said. But because the 5:58 was cancelled (we had seen this on the board coming in), people were being put on earlier trains. He studied his computer while the line behind me grew. Finally, he handed me two new tickets, saying “I got you on the 3:48.”

Waiting, we watched as children, sometimes entire families, arrived in brightly colored pajamas. A few of the cars were part of the Polar Express.

Our car, #2, was not one of them. Normally dressed people took their seats. When we departed, half a dozen of them were empty.