Where heat seeking New Yorkers spend Christmas and New Year

The swamps of Miami

Apologies for the lack of posting! I hope you missed me! Here's a longer than usual post with nice pictures to take you away from the cold :)
I have been Internet incapable, and actually it's been a novelty...
But the reason is simple, I was discovering that heat seeking New Yorkers often find themselves at Christmas and New Year, or holidays as it's known in these parts, in the much warmer getaways not too far away in Florida!
So, in the interests of trying things all New York-ish (if that's a word) we went down to Miami...
Okay, so those of you that really now, me, I go to Miami probably every winter, even from London.. but still...:)
Now, Miami is usually like the tropics, but even in Miami, the weather got chilly this year.
Kinda like a spring day in London. So not too bad. But natives were dressed in big woolly coats, hats gloves and scarves..they must have thought us insane, when all we had was a bit of a jumper on..if only to live in the tropics!
We got up to a few novelty things for us, like buying our first real Christmas tree, from the Fire fighters of Miami- who donate some of the proceeds to charities everywhere in Miami-Dade.

Charity tree choppers

One of these is our tree, perfect shape all of 'em thou grown in North Carolina

 During our trip we relaxed, chilled, watched movies, took in some sunshine when it was up, but my favorite highlight was the Fairchild Botanical Gardens where we saw the beautiful nature of it all..

Fairchild botanical gardens have almost every palm tree in the world, and especially the type that are endangered. They grow their own cocoa beans, fruit and even have a mini tropical rain forest and a butterfly garden...to find out more check it out Fairchild Gardens, Miami

 We found a Tiger Butterfly- native to the everglades, and we found some of these guys hanging around the beach areas too..





Beautiful waterlilies

This bird's squawk for its mate was so loud we couldn't help noticing it, and the red and orange butterfly was gorgeous, but I have no idea what they are called, feel free to let me know..

Then oddly... the beautiful gardens were interrupted by the filming of Four Weddings- the show where four brides attend each others wedding and rate each others on TV to compete for a plush honeymoon.. it was surreal, and they were all such divas, very loud and loving the attention.. getting ready for my fab mates wedding last October, we overdosed on watching it, so it was ironic to see them in action...

It's snowing right now in NYC and I thought we could all use pictures of some sunshine and nature :)