There is a version of this drive that takes twenty minutes. Get on the MacArthur, merge, sit in traffic, arrive. Nobody remembers that version. The good version takes most of a morning, involves at least two coffee stops, and happens with the top down and no doors between you and the city.
Miami Beach to Coconut Grove is only about ten miles. That is the joke of it. It is a distance you could cover without thinking, through some of the prettiest stretches of road in Florida, which is exactly why you should think about it. Do it in an open-air Moke and the ten miles stop being a commute and start being the day.
Skip Ocean Drive. Everyone tells you to go to Ocean Drive and everyone regrets it by 11am. Start instead in Sunset Harbour, on the quieter bay side of Miami Beach, where the streets are low rise and the parking is survivable and the neighborhood feels like people actually live there.
Get a cafecito from a ventanita, which is the walk up window you will find attached to half the cafes in this city. It is small, it is strong, and it is the correct fuel for a slow drive. Drink it standing up like a local. Then load up the Moke, because you are going to want company for this, and it seats four.
Here is the part nobody tells first time visitors. There are several ways off Miami Beach, and only one of them is genuinely beautiful. The Venetian Causeway hops across a chain of small residential islands on a low, narrow road with a speed limit that basically forces you to relax. There are drawbridges. Sometimes they go up. In a Moke, that is not a delay, that is just extra time on the water.
You will get waves. This happens constantly in a Moke and it stops being surprising by about the third one. Somebody at a light will ask what it is. Somebody on a paddleboard will take a photo of you. The car does a lot of social work on your behalf, which is a strange thing to say about a vehicle and completely true about this one.
Once you hit the mainland the city changes character fast. Brickell goes glass and tall and busy, then just as suddenly the road tips south onto Bayshore and the canopy closes over your head. This stretch is worth slowing down for even more than the causeway was, because you cannot appreciate a tree tunnel through a sunroof. You need the whole sky gone.
Stop at Vizcaya if the gardens are open. It is an early twentieth century estate sitting right on Biscayne Bay, wildly ornate, and completely at odds with everything around it in the best way.
Coconut Grove is where the drive earns itself. Banyan trees with roots like melted candle wax, sailboats stacked up at the marina, and actual peacocks strolling around the residential streets like they pay taxes there. Park near CocoWalk, wander, eat something, sit by the water.
The practical stuff is refreshingly boring. The full round trip barely dents the 80 mile range, and an electric Moke tops out at 45 mph, which is more than this route ever asks of it. When you get home you plug it into a normal household outlet, the same kind you charge your phone in, and it is full again by morning.
That is the whole trick to Miami. The distances are short and the good part is the space between them. Take the long way, take the top down, and let ten miles turn into a day.
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