Culture and Nature in God's Waiting Room

Saturday & Sunday, May 11 & 12, 2013--St. Petersburg

Our guidebook information says that St. Petersburg became known as "God's Waiting Room" because of the large number of retirees who moved here.  There are still a lot of elderly here, but it seems to be a young person's town, too, these days.

Saturday was our first day to explore St. Petersburg.  We drove downtown and parked just a few blocks from the waterfront and a few blocks south of downtown on one of the few streets that did not have a 2-hour time limit for parking.  That allowed us to leave our car there for about 6 hours as we explored.

We headed first to the Dali Museum which was only down the street about 4 blocks from where we parked.  It is one of the two major museums in the world dedicated to the work of Dali and the only one that is in the US.  They get lots of tourism here because of it.  We were lucky with our timing, since the day was the anniversary of Dali's birthday!  As we entered, they were announcing a presentation in the auditorium, so we went there.  Ladies were dressed with live roses on their heads to represent one of Dali's paintings, and they did a dramatic presentation about Dali's life and his love of Catalonia.  Afterward, we went to the galleries to see the paintings.  Although I had seen some pieces by Dali, it was interesting to see a full collection of paintings showing the variety of his work.  Also, they had very good docents giving tours; we stopped to hear the explanations of two paintings by two different docents which were interesting.  Toward the end of our visit, we went into an education room where a lady guided me in using a black pipe cleaner to make myself a Dali mustache which stayed in place because of tension created when two v-shapes were placed inside my nostrils.

We could see the University of South Florida St. Petersburg from the Museum.  It actually was only two blocks from where we were parked, so we explored the campus which is clean and nice and located on the waterfront.  Malcolm Butler who used to teach at A&M-CC with Wes and me teachers there now.  He has a nice place to work.

The next stop was the Museum of Fine Arts downtown.  It is a small museum with some nice pieces in it.  A special exhibit of paintings by Philip Pearlstein, an artist I didn't know before seeing this exhibition, was quite good.

Near there is the St. Petersburg Pier which juts out into the water and has an inverted pyramid housing shops, restaurants, an aquarium, and an observation deck.  We walked the pier and explored inside the pyramid.  At the end of this month, it will be torn down and a new pier constructed according to a publication we have.

At 17:30 we drove out Central Avenue to the Bodega Restaurant which we had read had some of the best Cuban food in St. Petersburg and which was listed among the 6 best Cuban restaurants on TripAdvisor in the whole Tampa Bay area.  We got sandwiches, rice and beans, and fried plantains for our dinner, and ate them at a sidewalk table watching the crowds arrive for the nearby Tropicana Field for a Tampa Bay Rays baseball game.

Central Avenue is lined for about two miles with small locally-owned shops, restaurants, and galleries.  On the second Saturday of every month, which this was, they have a gallery walk in the evening.  After eating, we went up and down several blocks looking at the art work and listening to the street musicians who were performing.  Our best stop was the Morean Art Center which is a museum featuring the glass art of Chihuly. Inside a choir was performing very nice music as a part of the open house.
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Since Saturday was dedicated much to seeing art, Sunday was a day for nature.  Saturday had been Wes' worst day with his cold, but he made it through it.  Saturday night had been his worst night with difficulties sleeping due to a cough, sore throat, and drainage.  Fortunately, he got better and better as Sunday went along and seems to be on the mend now.

We started with a stop at Weeden Island Nature Preserve.  It has lakes, mangrove swamps, pine trees, etc., which can be explored by trails.  We saw a large tortoise, big fish (about 18 inches long), small black crabs, lizzards, a large spider, etc., as we walked about 4 miles of trails.  It's a great natural area within the city limits (instead of having to drive far as we do in Texas to get somewhere like the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge)!  We were hot and sticky when we left there, so we decided to skip another park we had planned to explore and headed to Sam's Club for a large cola to re-hydrate ourselves.

Our next stop was Gulfport which used to be a small town and is now just part of the large metropolitan area around Tampa Bay.  However, it retains its quaint charm, and the guidebooks say it reminds those who have been in Florida for a long time as being like "Old Florida."  We parked (amazingly for free) at the two-block long beach and walked along it.  We went out on the pier.  We passed the Gulfport Casino which is famous as a place for dancing (with different nights dedicated to different styles of dance--Sunday night for ballroom dancing, Wednesday night for swing, etc.) and was featured in the film Cocoon.    We walked and drove up and down the streets paved with red bricks to see the many small restaurants which make the town famous also and to see the nice, old houses within the neighborhoods a few blocks from the beach.

From there, we decided to head back out to the barrier island and drive from the bottom up to the location where we had turned off it on Friday.  Unfortunately, the WHOLE stretch is developed.  There are no places to pull off and enjoy nature without paying $10-20 to park.  There are buildings after buildings--mostly large hotels and apartment buildings on the water side, and restaurants and smaller hotels backed by streets with houses on the left.  If Padre Island at home every develops like this, it will be sad.

Tomorrow, we leave the Clearwater-St. Petersburg area to explore to the north.  We haven't seen any of Tampa yet.  We will leave that for when we return to the area at the end of our trip.