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Published: July 29th 2014
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Thursday became a kind if spontaneous road trip day!
When we left chateaux Herder we weren't even sure if we were going to stay away for a night or not, so we packed over night bags, filled a cooler, and tried out our new insulated water bottles (I'm SURE there will be more on that topic later)
We headed west towards Tampa and St Petersburg along roads which time had forgotten! The only tourists out there would be very very lost tourists! I wanted to stop and take pictures of some of the very old falling down abandoned houses. Patty informed me that people wouldn't take kindly to some random woman taking pictures of their homes! I genuinely thought they were abandoned! Ha!
On our way to the west coast the weather turned and the sky just turned black. The monsoon put us off the beach a little and we went to st. Petersburg town itself to find lunch. Once we had eaten pretty authentic Thai food, we went to the new Dali museum on the waterfront,
The museum was designed by the same guy who did the pyramid
at the louvre and the glass was impressive, especially from the inside. The old museum was below sea level, and for a part of the world that's right next to the sea, and is prone to hurricanes, it's probably best to house millions of dollars worth of art work in somewhere that's more structurally secure than a tiki hut!
Dali's paintings are just stunning. His early work and his more famous paintings are just so skilful. My favourite was of a Spanish bull fighter, the painting was about 40ft high and no matter how many times you looked at it you saw something new each time. Very very impressive!! What I can't get my head around is where he started, because every single dot of paint is part of at least three separate things. We spent a good few hours in there just wandering around after our actual tour of the museum had finished.
Just outside the museum was the "avent garden" there were several photo opportunities which patty and I took full advantage of. Before getting back in the car and driving to the beach. The drive to the beach wasn't a mile
or two... It was still 30 minutes away. Eventually we found all the motels which are associated with Florida in the 1960s and we knew that we were just a stones throw from the Gulf of Mexico.
Patty wanted to find a big old hotel called the Don CeSar which she knew was somewhere on St Pete's beach. After another long while of driving we found a palatial pink building sticking out above everything else. The car was parked and we wandered in for a nosy. It was absolutely gorgeous inside and out. Right on the beach and around 100 years old (American ancient) it had hosted all the movers and shakers of the 1920s and 1930s before being turned into a place for exhausted WW2 pilots to go and get some R&R.
At some point it was decided that we NEEDED ice cream. Not hotel ice cream but real ice cream parlour right on the beach ice cream. So we drove on, and took a wrong turn somewhere, and ended up exactly at the right place. On the beach, next to a wonderful ice cream parlour in glorious sunshine (which came out just
Dali museum
Outside the Dali museum people would write thoughts on the underside of their access bands and then stick them around a tree in the garden for the occasion!)
By this time it was 6pm or so and it seemed a bit pointless to stay by the beach, I mean we just had ice cream for dinner... How could be enhance our beach experience any further? On the drive home Patty took us on to little detour to go over a beautiful bridge, I could see for miles, struggled to get pictures though.
We got home just as the sun was setting and another wonderful day was done. I have yet to see a legendary chateaux Herder sunset over the lake yet this trip.. But there is still time!
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