Memorable Moments with My Best Friend... My Mother

Vacations are always memorable, but more meaningful when spent with a loved one. A contributing writer to Memorable Moments shares her special time spent with her best friend, her mother…

“I love to travel with my best friend, who also happens to be my mother. Living on opposite coasts means we don’t get to see each other often, but when we do, we try to create an experience we both never will forget.

Miami, Florida is one of my favorite destinations, for the variety of experiences it offers. You can spend your days lolling on a white sugar beach and bathing in warm, blue-green tropical waters. Facing the ocean, you can imagine yourself on a Caribbean vacation… Turn back toward the city and witness the high-rise hotels of South Beach, where you have the ability to choose your evening’s entertainment from among the most creative of world-class restaurants and nightclubs.

I was surprised when my mother told me that in all of her 65 years and amongst two dozen-plus excursions to Florida, she had never visited Miami. Instantly I knew this city had to be the destination for our next adventure. To make things even more interesting, I planned for us to spend the first two days of our week exploring the Florida Keys together, a place neither of us had been but always wanted to see.

After a serendipitous, simultaneous arrival at the airport baggage carousel from separate flights, we loaded up our rental convertible and headed across the intercoastal into Miami Beach. The drive from Miami to Key Largo, the town that serves as the gateway to these barrier islands, was surprisingly brief and stunningly beautiful. We arrived at our destination, a too-cute-for-words, old Florida-style beach resort set on the bay. We spent the next two days making friends with the osprey who lived in the gardens, other guests, and the charming owners of the resort, a couple from Manhattan who fled the city, opting for early retirement and a bright future as innkeepers in tropical paradise.

I knew it would be a hard sell to convince Mom to leave this place after only two days – especially after our first taste of real Florida key lime pie at the BBQ shack next door -- so we spontaneously agreed to extend for another two nights. We shopped for shells, picked out some T-shirts, postcards, and a couple of boxes of key lime candy for Dad, who was lovingly minding Mom’s cats and dogs back home. In the town of Marathon, we had our first encounter with a tiki bar and discovered that rum punch indeed packs a powerful wallop.

Before we knew it, our extra two days in the laid-back Keys were up and it was time to head to our hotel on South Beach. After years of traveling with my frugal father, my Mom had become accustomed to staying at roadside motels and munching on donuts and instant coffee for breakfast. To show her the other side of travel life, I splurged on a deluxe suite at a beachfront hotel in the less-crowded area of Miami Beach. As predicted, once Mom laid eyes the quarters where she would be ensconced for the next three nights, her mood quickly brightened. A dip in one of the two hotel pools, with its exotic palm tree island in the middle, restored her childlike glee.

That evening, I made reservations at a hip, new, celebrity-owned restaurant, one that won rave notices for its food as well as its resident trapeze artist. I convinced Mom to get dressed up in her finest, promising a meal she would not soon forget. Our dinner turned out to be even more delicious than the atmosphere. After capping the night with a shared Crème Brule and double espresso all-around, we returned to our car in the parking lot of the restaurant. We couldn’t resist snapping photos of ourselves standing beside a Rolls Royce Phantom in the space next to ours, giggling like two giddy teenagers, creating a memento of our high-styling evening on the town.

Before we knew it, our three days in Miami had expired. Time does indeed fly when you are having fun! Tired but happy, we headed for the airport to catch our respective flights home. Mom called me the next day. Dad liked the key lime candy, his T-shirt from the Keys, and the photos of the resort in Key Largo, the osprey, and us posing at the tiki bar in Marathon.

She was undecided if we should share the Miami stories or the Rolls Royce picture with Dad, not sure if he would understand or support our splurge. We agreed it was probably best to keep it to ourselves. We were not putting down his way of traveling, just wanting to experience a different way of doing it. After all, some things in life are better left a secret between mother and daughter.”