Don't get me wrong: It's not that I don't enjoy spending 10 or 15 minutes brushing, scraping, pounding on and swearing at my car only to find the doors are still frozen solid and I have to climb in through the back hatch. And I'm sure the neighbors enjoyed it immensely.

I haven't always lived in Pittsburgh, but I have always lived in a cold climate, and I was brainwashed from an early age to believe that these ordeals build character that lazy, perma-tanned tropical slackers who lie around on verandahs sipping fruit drinks year-round will never possess. How this character is distinguishable from Seasonal Affective Disorder has never been entirely clear to me.

But I'm obviously weak. Because after two or three months of wearing snow boots, earmuffs, mittens (warmer than gloves and three times likelier to make you drop your keys in a drift!) a parka and splashes of slush, I feel the need to escape for a few precious days to thaw.

This year, I went to Miami Beach. South Beach, in fact, which is famous for its diet industry and acres of beautiful people who don't need to be on diets because they can acquire perfect bodies simply by purchasing them.

South Beach is also famous for its Art Deco District, which has a lot of hotels and apartment buildings built in the '30s in the Art Deco style and then allowed to fall apart, which means they are now being renovated at great expense and earsplitting volume.

The weird thing is that the Art Deco hotels that haven't yet felt the kiss of a jackhammer seem oddly familiar -- if, that is, you were a big fan of "Miami Vice" in the '80s. (That's what I was immersed in when I should have been at the college library immersed in a semester's worth of Mass Marketing and Communications.) I kept pausing on the sidewalk and staring at the dilapidated facades and littered stairwells, waiting for Sonny Crockett to whirl around a doorway, level his gun and yell, "Tubbs! Get me some socks!"

The other main feature of South Beach is hordes of dainty, tanned, bejeweled women who carry enormous handbags with heads. The heads belong to tiny, shivering topiary dogs, and I can only marvel that Paris Hilton has succeeded in turning a live animal into a fashion accessory, like a scarf or underpants.

Personally, I wouldn't want a dog's bottom, however small, spending any amount of time in the same place where I keep my lipstick, but I'm not terribly sophisticated.

It should have been very exciting, from a journalist's point of view, to find myself in South Florida on the day Fidel Castro resigned, but it wasn't nearly as big a deal as you would think. I spent a good chunk of the morning glued to the TV in my Art Deco hotel room, because I am a professional journalist and anyway it looked like it might rain.

Later, I took a more grassroots, flip-flops on the ground approach and went down to see what the mood on the street was. Despite sitting in a sidewalk cafe eating yogurt and melon for upwards of 15 minutes, I didn't get any good quotes or pictures of flag-waving at all.

Most of what I learned about Miami came from a rental-car guy who picked me up at my hotel. (He was getting me a car, not just picking me up over a couple of $10 mojitos.)

I was able to get him to open up to me because he was a Penn State grad from Philly who apparently lacked the character to stay in Pennsylvania until his pipes froze. I confided to him that global warming has so far done nothing to improve a Pennsylvania February, and he shared this amazing and little-known fact about Florida:

There is no state inspection there.

That explains a lot, frankly. When I reluctantly got behind the wheel of that rental car and launched myself across the Julia Tuttle Causeway and onto I-95, I didn't have to wonder at the number of vehicles I saw held together with plastic, duct tape and filthy bits of cloth that may, at one time, have been Don Johnson's socks.

And that's all I'm going to write about South Florida, because it's just too intimidating. It's the land of Dave Barry and Carl Hiaasen, after all. I can barely even vacation there, because Hiaasen's excellent novels are filled with dumb/crass/hapless tourists, and every time I squirt sunblock on my pasty hide I feel like one of his doofus characters.

But Hiaasen has always lived in Florida. I bet he can't drive in snow worth spit. I'd like to see him climb into a frozen car through the back hatch. Because I'll tell you, that takes serious doofus character.