Living near downtown Miami can be stressful – the endless car honks, people yelling to each other in languages you didn’t even know existed and others jockeying to cut you off just to shave off 4-seconds from their daily commutes. But it definitely has its advantages. Miami boasts incredible weather. For us, that’s the best part. A close second is the views. Although towering building sit together on the edge of the ocean willy-nilly without any sense of organization, it does make up a beautiful skyline and some nice dining experiences.

But in yesterday’s case, a nice bonus is things are close. When a concert comes to town, the American Airlines Arena is only a few blocks away. Wanna take a cruise? You could bike to the port. Wedding show? Well, that’s across the street. So about 18 hours before the show, Tara managed some free tickets and we had our date for Monday.

Typically, Mondays are tough to plan anything. Most of you know Tara is currently working an 11pm-9am shift in TV News. She loves it. But the hours are killer. So after coming off a weekend living like a ‘normal person’…Mondays are used for recovery and an attempt to start the week off below par, not 5-over. But she insisted we tackled the ‘Wedding Salon Wedding Expo’ at the Epic Hotel at 4:00pm. She said 5:00. Her plan was to sleep until 3:58 and start getting ready.

We left at about 6:45pm. Miraculously. Mondays, remember? But Tara was excited. She just received word that she was making progress on her wedding dress (something that was stressing her out)…so no one could stop her, not even sleep depravity.

The event was nice, I must admit. I had to wear a ‘I’m the Groom’ sticker. I got a free bag of stuff ladies would freak over (although I’ve already annihilated the caramel corn). We drifted from one vendor to another. Ridiculous cakes on one end (which we bypassed altogether), flowers throughout and DJs and Videographers on each end. I was interested in that the most. We stopped by one company specializing in slow motion video. Get your wedding guests to dress up and throw fake money, confetti and whatever else they want in the air and make crazy faces and they’ll export a video in 240 frames per second. Think slow motion golf swings on the Golf Channel…but way more entertaining.

We talked with a few photographers. The hard-cover picture books really seem to be ‘in’ these days. They’re awesome…but spendy. Heck, they could have been ‘in’ for 20 years and I wouldn’t know the difference. There was one book there that would eat up 85% of your coffee table. I’d have to sell our first kid to order one. Don’t think I’ll be doing that.

In the end it was a great 60 minutes of idea-generating, cocktail-sipping, on-screen slow motion acting and networking. Afterwards we went up a few floors and had some appetizers at Area 31 – a restaurant that’s right across from us that we’ve been meaning to visit for two years.

It’s amazing what you find when you get out to take walk. Just plug your years when you cross the bridge and if someone yells at you in a different language do as Tara does:

I don’t know…I’m from Canada.