The South

To get to Palm Beach, you can take either Interstate 95 or Florida’s Turnpike. There isn’t much to look at along either route, and as my phone’s connection drops out, I find myself fiddling with the radio. I hear preachers, then Spanish, then Haitian Creole, and more preachers as I inch closer toward Palm Beach, a stop I’ll be skipping because the president is in town, playing golf at his winter White House.

I head down 95 until I hit Boca Raton, which has some of the most expensive gated communities and homes in the country. My grandma moved to an underdeveloped part of the city in the late 1980s, then watched the strawberry fields she could see from her window uprooted to make room for more buildings. “Boca’s Boca” is all she would say.

Like countless others, my grandparents made their way down there, first as wintertime visitors, then as full-time residents. Both of my grandfathers, who were so happy for a short time after they traded the weather and problems of the North for their new home and their new lives, died within a decade of making the move. That thought crosses my mind as I pump my gas and decide that Boca doesn’t hold anything for me.

Farther south down the highway, Miami, on the other hand, does have plenty I want to experience. For all of the misconceptions people have about Florida, Miami tends to escape scrutiny. Sure, it has long been pegged as the cocaine capital, largely thanks to movies and television shows, but it also has a special international flair.

Before I go to my hotel, I drive downtown, past the old Freedom Tower building. Constructed in 1925, it got its name in the 1960s as the place where Cubans fleeing Castro were taken to be processed and documented. Today it houses an art museum (closed until next spring). Nearby they are building the One Thousand Museum, designed by Zaha Hadid, the future crown jewel of the neighborhood. Miami is in the middle of another building boom, despite rising sea levels.

But life goes on. For now, there are always neon lights flashing and Pitbull songs playing somewhere. Both, in fact, are happening as I sit down at the poolside bar of the retro-kitsch Vagabond Hotel in the MiMo district. In my first hour at the bar, I also hear Spanish, Arabic, French and plenty of Long Island accents, and talk with a young Japanese guy who tells me he moved to Miami because he’s a graffiti artist.