Fishing and a night at the Fontainbleau

I am down in Boca Raton with Howard and we are having something of a boy’s weekend. We kicked things off Friday morning with an 8 a.m. 4-hour fishing expedition Pompano Beach. Conditions were good; seas calm and the skies blue without a cloud. Temps were unusually warm. Howard pulled in a beautiful mutton snapper (although why a fish is named after a lamb confuses me) and two yellow tail. I caught a tiny fish called a French Grunt, which they let me keep. The only good thing for me was that I caught the first fish of the day! Howard’s snapper took second prize in the pool and he won a whopping $28. (Please don’t try to borrow from him….he already doled it out on tips.) I got a little flambeed by the sun. Kind of dumb. Our fish were the ones in the picture foreground.


We rested in the afternoon from the rigors of battling the behemoths from the deep and then drove down to the Fontainbleau Hotel in Miami where Howard had a business appointment with the National Sales Director, Louis. A few words about pulling into the driveway of the ultra-chic
Fontainbleau Hotel, which just completed a billion dollar renovation and is now the outpost for all that is hip and happening in South Florida, which is to say the world. There are Beamers, there are Porches, there are Bentleys, there are Hummers. And then there is Adrian and Howard puttering up to valet parking in the Bobba-mobile, my mom's 10-year-old Toyota Camry that was covered fender to fender with God-awful dust from the relentless construction taking place at her building. They almost made us take the servants’ entrance. But we met Louis in the lobby and he showed us this unbelievably stunning hotel that is famous the world over for its sweeping and curving facade (remember the pool scene in Goldfinger at the opening…..it was shot at the hotel). Louis then took us to dinner at the hotel’s premiere Italian restaurant, where we had a outdoor table overlooking the ocean and the pool. The waiter was pushing the goat very hard but Howard said he had a goat sandwich for lunch before he left NY so we passed. Dessert was a delicious gold guava soup with custard and a sweet biscuit. Just perfect. Thanks How and Louis.

Carpe Diem.