“There's a man on the broadwalk playing steel drums at 9 AM, and nobody has asked him to stop, possibly ever.”

The cab from Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International takes fifteen minutes if traffic cooperates, which it mostly does if you land before noon. You come south on A1A and the strip malls give way to low-rise condos, then suddenly there's the Atlantic on your left, impossibly turquoise for a Tuesday. The driver turns onto North Ocean Drive and the first thing you register isn't the resort — it's the broadwalk. Hollywood spells it that way on purpose, broad instead of board, because the thing is wide enough to fit cyclists, joggers, electric scooters, a guy walking four dachshunds, and a woman in a sequined caftan all at once without anyone clipping anyone else. The salt air hits before the lobby doors open. You're already on vacation and you haven't checked in yet.

The plan was simple: fly into Fort Lauderdale a day early, sleep one night, board the cruise ship in the morning. The kind of logistical padding that saves you from being the couple sprinting through the terminal in flip-flops. Margaritaville Hollywood Beach Resort sits right on the broadwalk at the north end, which means you're steps from the sand but also steps from a half-dozen taco stands and a gelato place called La Dolce Vita that does a pistachio worth remembering.

Steel drums and chlorine

The resort leans into its Buffett-branded identity without drowning in it. There are parrots on things. There's a giant flip-flop somewhere. The lobby smells like coconut sunscreen even in the off-season. But the bones of the place are solid — it's a proper beachfront high-rise with a multi-level pool deck that includes a FlowRider surf simulator, a lazy river, and enough lounge chairs that the 6 AM towel wars you see at some resorts don't really happen here. The pool bar, LandShark Bar & Grill, pours frozen drinks in sizes that should require a waiver, and the bartender — a guy named Marco the afternoon we were there — makes a surprisingly good spicy mango margarita that costs about $18 and earns every cent of it.

The room itself is clean, bright, and aggressively beachy in a way that works better than it should. Ours faced the ocean, and waking up to that particular shade of morning Atlantic — pale green going silver near the horizon — is the kind of thing that makes you briefly reconsider the cruise altogether. The bed is comfortable. The shower has good pressure. The balcony is just wide enough for two chairs and a small table, which is all a balcony needs to be. I'll note that the walls aren't thick — we could hear our neighbors' alarm at 5:45 AM, which is how I know they were also catching a ship. There's a solidarity in that, two parties on opposite sides of drywall, both packing sunscreen in the dark.

What the resort gets right is that it doesn't try to keep you inside. The broadwalk is the attraction, and the hotel knows it. Walk south for ten minutes and you hit the heart of it — the stretch between Johnson Street and Garfield Street where the restaurants cluster and the people-watching reaches Olympic caliber. GG's Waterfront Bar does a fried grouper sandwich that locals swear by. Nick's Bar & Grill has been there long enough that the neon looks like it grew there. The beach itself is wide, the sand is coarse enough to not stick to everything, and the lifeguard stands are painted in colors that look ridiculous in photos and perfect in person.

“The broadwalk doesn't care if you're here for one night or one month — it gives you the whole show either way.”

Back at the resort, there are enough dining options to fill a short stay without repeating yourself. JWB Prime Steak and Seafood is the upscale play — white tablecloths, proper wine list, the kind of place where you order the bone-in ribeye and pretend you're not wearing shorts under the table. For something faster, the grab-and-go spot near the lobby does açaí bowls and cold brew that hit right before a morning on the sand. The resort also has a small spa, though we didn't test it — time was short and the ocean was right there.

One thing nobody mentions: the elevators are slow. Not broken-slow, just leisurely, as if they too are on island time. By the second ride down you stop checking your watch and start reading the Margaritaville quotes printed inside the car. "If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane" is the one I remember, mostly because I read it four times waiting to reach the lobby. It's the kind of mild inconvenience that becomes part of the charm if you let it — and if you can't let it, you might be at the wrong hotel.

Morning, leaving

The morning we left, we walked the broadwalk one more time. The steel drum guy was already set up near the bandshell, working through a slow version of something I couldn't place. A woman was doing tai chi on the sand in bare feet. The taco stands were still shuttered, but the coffee window at the resort was open, and we carried paper cups south toward the pier and watched a pelican dive for breakfast with more commitment than I've shown to most things in my life.

Port Everglades is a twenty-minute cab ride north. If you're catching a cruise, the timing is painless. But standing there with the sand still on my shoes, watching the broadwalk wake up for a day I wouldn't be part of, I understood why people come back. The cruise was the plan. Hollywood Beach was the accident. The accident was better.

Rooms start around $250 a night in shoulder season, climbing past $450 in peak winter months — what you're buying is the ocean view, the pool deck, and a broadwalk address that puts you in the middle of Hollywood Beach without needing a car for anything.