I have worked for a Rakuten company for several years, and while the benefits are pretty great, few perks compare to the one I was able to take advantage of last August: scoring free tickets for club seats at the FC Barcelona game in Miami. The only catch? It was that night.
I came into the downtown Tampa office on a seemingly normal Wednesday morning and found that our office Slack channel was blowing up because, since Rakuten is currently an FCB sponsor, we had some tickets up for grabs for the game. I quickly texted my husband Tyler to see if he wanted to go – after all, our club seats would include dinner and drinks, but it did mean leaving work early and driving to Miami in just a few hours.
He got approval to work from the car, so I confirmed we could go and immediately headed home. I spent the next few hours working from my house, securing a dogsitter (the dogs can’t always travel with us) and waiting for Ty to get home so we could hit the road.
There are many great day trips from Tampa, but Miami shouldn’t be considered one of them. We left around 1pm to make sure we could enjoy food and drinks before the game started at 7pm, since we had about five hours of driving ahead of us. We met up with some of my other coworkers who were able to attend and enjoyed a great game. However, the real adventure was still ahead of us: getting home.
If we had time to plan or had even spent some time thinking about it, we would have found a place to spend the night in Miami or the surrounding area… but we didn’t. So when the game ended around 10pm, we finally got out of the parking lot around 11pm, and we drove home to St. Pete. Our only stops were at a gas station and a McDonald’s, since we needed caffeine to make it the rest of the way, and I distinctly recall finally getting into bed at 3am.
I am not a last-minute traveler by nature, but this was an opportunity we had to jump on – similar to the time my friend Liz and I found ourselves heading from work to a Shakira concert in Orlando, though that’s another story. However, it’s important to know your limits when you’re hastily putting together these trips. Driving to Miami from the Tampa Bay area in one day is completely reasonable; driving to AND from Miami in one day when the next day, you have a dentist appointment before work and your final grad school presentation, will make you want to die a little bit.
But hey, you live, you learn – this “day trip” was still worth it.