After too long under fluorescent lights, Jess and I headed down this past weekend for a very brief jaunt to Miami Beach. The trip started off well enough, with a smooth flight down on Friday morning, and a free rental car upgrade to a new VW Beetle – which drove sort of like a turbo-charged go-cart – in the early afternoon.

We pulled up to our hotel, however, a ’boutique’ designed by Richard Meier, to discover an alarming array of rust stains running down the side of the building, and a valet parking attendant wearing, as a uniform, a pit-stained t-shirt and thoroughly yellowed khaki shorts. Further bad news inside, when we discovered that the hotel would shortly be razed to make way for a new, high-end Richard Meier condo, and that things had essentially been left to seed since the replacement had been planned, apparently a good five or ten years back.

As a result, the room, for instance, featured badly stained carpets, walls and ceilings, including what was clearly dried fecal matter crusted to the bathroom light-switch plate. The sheets looked dirty and threadbare, the closet doors hung at odd angles, and everything was pervaded with a slightly ‘pungent’ scent.

But, in an attempt to be good travelers, Jess and I looked past the room, and the crumpled used tissues littering the hall near our door. Instead, we figured, we’d head down to the pool and the beach, and simply spend as much of the weekend outside as possible.

Lo and behold, however, we discovered that the ‘private beach’ was actually a weed-ridden patch of shady sand, well removed from any observable body of water, scattered with rusted lawn chairs, and featuring an aging leathery woman sunning her low-hanging fake tits while chain-smoking Newports.

Still holding up our chins, we headed back to the pool, set out looking for towels, and were informed that we’d need to fork over an extra $25 ‘towel fee’ for the day. With that last straw, it was back to the room to retrieve our laptop, then down to the wifi-ed lobby to kayak.com an emergency transfer to anywhere less piece-of-shit.

As the weekend fell smack in the middle of spring break, we were unable to find anything for Friday evening – instead sneaking in to the nearby Sheraton’s pool, and wandering the adjacent Shops at Bal Harbour, before sleeping fitfully on top of sheets we tried to touch as little as possible. But, early Saturday morning, we hopped back in the (delightfully comparatively clean) Beetle, and headed down Collins Ave., to the National Hotel in South Beach, a beautiful old art deco property, with a long, slender waveless lap pool (designed for Esther Williams), and rooms regularly cleaned and poop-crust free.

The downside: apparently, the hotel was also the home for a weekend DJ convention, featuring showdowns by some of the best trance, deep house, and otherwise thumpy music spinners in the world. Which, while making for a remarkably MTV Spring Break scene and attracting long, long lines of pierced and tattooed visitors to the hotel, also left sunbathing a bit less relaxing than it might otherwise have been.

Still, I didn’t mind. We were joined for part of the weekend by Jess’ wonderful younger sister, and generally enjoyed the chance to sunburn our way out of the winter doldrums, horse around in the pool, sip pina coladas, and feel condescendingly glad we didn’t look like most of the people wandering up and down Miami Beach.

Summer, bring it.