St. Petersburg, FL is a city on water. It sits on the Pinellas peninsula between Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, and is connected to mainland Florida to the north.
I finally managed to string a few thoughts together after our trip there about a month ago.
On our first morning in St. Pete (as we have learned that everyone calls it), we went to The Hangar restaurant for breakfast. Appropriately named, it is perched above a small private airport, where planes take off right from under your plates. I actually know someone who lives in Florida and not only owns their small private plane, but they built it themselves (former airline pilots, now retired). Yeah, Florida does seem sometimes like the land of all possibilities, until you check out their politics (I could not help but notice that there is even a “Fox” car rental place in the Tampa airport. No joking!). I was just fascinated how much traffic that small airport displayed in just less than an hour while we were eating our fresh fruit. And Florida does have really good fresh fruit!
At the restaurant, we had a very cranky waitress. She was fine and all till the hostess placed two small children with their grandmas (who reminded me of Grace and Frankie: one, in a posh pair of pressed pants, and the other in a Dali “surrealist” shirt and a flower-pattern Hawaiian pair of baggy pants) in her section, right next to our table. She hurried to get the kids’ order ready first, saying that “She tried to be fast so they have something to keep them busy for a bit.” One of the grandmas is impressed and says “Wow! You must have kids of your own. You know how to handle them!” to which the waitress says with a frown: “No, I don’t have any. I actually very much dislike kids.” Mic drop! I have been accused of being bluntly honest myself, but dang!
The cranky was everywhere in Florida, I might add: the hotel receptionist was flustered when someone came to grab a drink from the fridge at the front desk and asked them to add it to their room tab (why? isn’t this how it works?!). Then, the receptionist told us that to get our valet to drive our car around, we should text this number (showing it to us on a piece of paper), and “they sometimes answer it.” I was confused. So, sometimes we won’t get our car back (the parking was valet only). Another hotel guest confirmed in the elevator that “yeah, you need to call and then come down and wait for at least 20-30 minutes and sometimes they need reminders even after that. But they will eventually get your car. Good times!” - she added. I was beginning to wonder where the “Southern hospitality” lives in Florida?! Definitely not in the ... umm ... “hospitality” industry.
We did run into this sweet hostess at the Dali museum, right after we stepped in. She advised us, unsolicited, where we could go and start the guided tour through the museum with a docent. This proved to be a really nice experience as the docent walked the galleries with us, sharing real-life stories about Dali and explaining the paintings through that realistic frame. This docent was one of the most memorable parts of the trip: she could not have been more than 4ft 11in in height, with a voice as quiet as a whisper, and she must have been at least 100 years of age! And this is no exaggeration. She was using a walker and her small frame was bent over by age and osteoporosis. Her fingers crooked and gnarly. She was frail in stature and physique, but so sharp in mind and humor. At times, she made the stories about Dali eating cheese on the Parisian sidewalks and watching the bull fights so real that we were thinking she must have been there and witnessed these moments herself.
There are details like these that make travels unforgettable. The museum was everything I was looking forward to: originality, breathlessness to be in the same room with some of the most amazing works of art of all centuries. But the docent, the Avant-garden where we had a small pastry snack on the persistence of memory bench, were details that punctuated it with uniqueness and gave it a vivid contour, all ours.
If in Arizona, we had the best experience with foods - availability and diversity everywhere - in St. Petersburg we had some spotty encounters.
We were hard pressed to find a breakfast place on Sunday morning (which was also my birthday as well as Easter). After striking out on several places that could not place us or offered to place us after a minimum of two hours, we ended up having breakfast at Starbucks! And what do you know: even Starbucks was out of bagels.We wanted to try out what seemed to be a more off-the-beaten-path breakfast place called Bacon Bitch. Seriously - who would not want to eat in a place by this name?! But as we were waiting to be seated, I saw one of the waitresses smoking in the kitchen as she was rearranging her shorts and ponytail while she cleaned out the edges of the plates with her spare hand before taking them to the customers in the dining room. I was hungry, but umm ... Nope ... Sorry, Bacon Bitch: clever name, but you lost me! Literally.
We did find a couple of good food places. Frenchy’s Outpost in Dunedin had the fresh seafood you expect from a seashore town. The Teak restaurant is a show stopper: it is at the very end of the St. Pete Pier and a feat of architectural design. It looks like a spaceship waiting for lift-off. Although the food was remarkable (they had replaced their regular seafood menu with “Easter”-inspired dishes, so it was more mashed potatoes and ham and less seafood gumbo), the view is why it’s worth the trek. Best views of the water and of the bay towards the city that we could find. The sunset over St. Pete was stunning, even on a cloudy day.
We visited the Chihuly Collection at the Morean Arts Center on one of the days. The Chihuly pieces were amazing, as we expected, but what was truly memorable was the glass-blowing demonstration we watched after visiting the museum. Glass blowing is not only an amazing feat of human skill and ingenuity, but there is also so much science - particularly chemistry, physics and biology that goes into it - and those were explained in detail. Made me want to call my nephews and ask them to make sure they stay in school and won’t skip their science classes ever. They will be useful for something. One day!
Glass blowing demonstration at the Morean Arts Center
I am glad to see more and more mural art in many of the towns and cities we visit. I have always liked murals and even tasteful graffiti art - it’s always surprising the amount of talent and thought that goes into creating them and really gives the flavor and tone of a particular city. And St. Pete is another one of these “mural cities”.
St. Petersburg seemed like a mish-mash of a variety of styles, really: I would say that here, modern meets art deco meets traditional Southern charm. In terms of vegetation, palm trees, live oak and Spanish moss dress up the avenues. A bit of the tropics line up the St. Pete Pier parks. If you really want to take in the tropics, the Sunken Gardens has them on display! You get lost in the tropical forest there, with no hope of finding your way back.
We had a lunch snack at the Doc Ford’s Rum Bar and Grille right at the pier. The place was an absolute zoo on a holiday (there is definitely no Covid19 anymore, folks!), but The Eagles (who we had just seen in concert in Greensboro only 4 days before our trip) music was blasting and our waiter, Patrick, knew how to serve up pina coladas and yummy crab cake appetizers.
Not sure if this is all of Florida, but at least St. Petersburg on a busy, warm afternoon in the blazing sun is a pure stench cocktail: the smells of the ocean, salt, sewage, and sweat mix together in the most distinctive odor.
The area around the St. Pete Pier reminded me of so many other public touristy piazzas where jokers, dancers, mimes, religious orators trying to save your soul merge to remind you that this world is nothing but Babylon redone: we saw people walking a tightrope as they were practicing yoga in a park, people stringing hammocks from palm trees on the bay, and a crowd of people dancing on club techno music, as if in a reinvented version of the 1990’s MTV’s Spring Break shows.
You know you’re in Florida when you drive on what seems to be a highway but you see nothing but water all around you, not a lick of civilization, for miles on end. Only in Florida do you drive endlessly on ... water. We saw this sign while getting ready to drive on one of the many bridges that read: “Long bridge ahead. Check gas.” And I thought running out of gas in the middle of the desert in Utah would be bad ...
This was a weekend of strange coincidences. As coincidences go, you never know what they mean. You just notice, if barely: we went to St. Petersburg for my birthday which is 4/9 - or 9/4 in Europe. The entire weekend, these two numbers kept popping up everywhere:
The Starbucks we finally had a small breakfast at on 4/9 was at the corner of 4th St N and 9th Ave N. Its address was 900A 9th Ave N.
When I woke up that morning, I had 9 tabs open on my google app.
Chihuly’s Macchia Forest collection has 9 pieces in it.
At the end of the day, I had walked 4.09 miles, according to my watch.
Our departure gate was number 90. The very last one.
Seeing the Dali museum was the purpose of this trip and that did not disappoint. Everything else was just the cherries on top.
