Exploring Tampa

Friday, May 24, 2013--Tampa

Since it was a weekday, we planned most of our activities for suburban areas.  Tomorrow, we will head to the downtown area when parking will be easier and free at meters.

We started at Lettuce Lake Regional Park.  It's a large park along a river with a very long set of boardwalks over the swampy terrain.  It has many old-growth cypress trees that are huge in diameter.  It also has alligators, lots of water birds, etc.

From there, we went down the street to explore the main campus of the University of South Florida.  Founded in 1960, it has grown from 5 buildings then to 164 now.  The Tampa campus has 40,000 students.  It's a nice campus with a golf course, a large riverside park with recreation facilities, the SunDome for basketball games and entertainment events, some nice (and some not so nice) architecture, etc.

In the late afternoon we went to the Skatepark of Tampa, a world-famous skateboarding institution.  It is privately owned and located in an industrial area.  There is a shop selling everything a skateboarder might need.  But the main attractions are two buildings and a patio between which make up a huge skatepark with ramps, rails, curved walls, etc.  School students were just arriving when we got there, but so were the "shaving" group of 20- and 30-year-olds who are still into the sport.  It was amazing seeing how skilled one of the older guys was and several of the very younger guys (8-10-year-olds) were.  One family arrived with one of their boys dressed in gear.  I talked to the mother.  He has had one class and was there for the first time to try to skate in the park.  He was 6.  He was hesitant at first, and it was obvious that he was a bit afraid that the fast boys might run over him.  Eventually, he got bolder and bolder.  An hour later, he was going up ramps, down ramps, learning to push himself off with his feet, etc.  He has a long way to go, but he had made quite a bit of progress at learning to take his chances inside the park.

We arrived downtown at 6:00 when the parking meters become free and headed for the Tampa Museum of Art.  It is open late on Fridays and is free.  We were glad we didn't pay to go there.  Although in a very nice building, there is really very little to see other than special exhibits--one of large photographs from Cuba by Michael Eastman, one representing stages in paintings from the revolution to the present in Mexico, and one of sculptures that won national recognition recently.  The photographs from Cuba were by far the best of the show.