Off Again: Day 20

Weather photo

I’m not sure I should still be calling this “Off Again” since I’m on my way home but there it is. It got down to 9°C last night. Yeah, I know, I know. I shouldn’t complain. But they asked me not to turn the heat on if it got cold in case it bothered the neighbours (?), just to turn the thermostat up to about 79  so the air conditioning would stay off.  As a result, my room was cold and damp this morning and I didn’t want to get out of bed where I was cozy and warm.  No more summer clothes for me, I think, until May.

Had a bite to eat, loaded the car, and checked out.  Plugged ‘1 Dali Blvd, St. Petersburg’ into the car’s GPS and off I went.  Trying to avoid toll roads/bridges, it took me at least twice as long as I thought it would and when I got there, I had to turn on my Easy Roam, download a parking app, and register in order to park.  By the time I got into the museum, it was almost 1 pm.  I gave myself 1 1/2 hrs parking and headed inside, taking photos of the amazing building.

The ground floor is a gift shop and café and I actually spent quite a bit of time looking around there.  I was really impressed.  Yesterday at the Ringling Estate, I talked with one of the sales clerks about the items they had for sale.  Apart from the circus items, they had nothing that I couldn’t have bought at the Nat’l Gallery Gift Shop in Ottawa — same jewelry, same books (with one or two exceptions), same coasters, same scarves, same everything.  There are such beautiful designs throughout the mansion and the gardens that they could so easily have incorporated into giftware that people would love to buy for others or themselves.  She was very nice and thanked me and said she saw what I meant.

Today, the Dali Museum Gift Shop had everything Dali!  T-shirts, fancy dress jackets, ties, scarves, cups and saucers, purses, jewelry — everything based on his artwork and style.  That’s exactly how it should be.  The galleries are on the 3rd floor and at first, I was a bit disappointed.  When I think of Dali, I think of his incredible glass art.  There was none anywhere.  It was all paintings.  And then I realized, this was really great because it opened me up to a side of Dali that I really hadn’t given much thought to before and it was really quite amazing. I ended up having lunch there after taking some photos of my favourite things which included the painting of Christopher Columbus discovering the new land that one of the vendors at the Arts and Crafts Fair yesterday had told me about.

There was one photo that a group going through with the docent were gathering at and taking photos and I could see the camera of one fellow and it didn’t seem to be the painting we were all looking at.  It was a woman looking up into the sky.  I took a photo of the painting and walked away.  Later when I was uploading the photos to my iPad I realized what my photo looked like.  I’m definitely going to have to do research on this.  I swear it didn’t look like this.  Keep it small and look at the outline.

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By 2:45 I was on my way to Jacksonville, Fl.  This, too, took a bit longer than expected but as I was later leaving St. Petersburg than I thought it wasn’t totally unexpected that I would arrive about a half hour after sunset.  I got the last downstairs room, close to the breakfast room, and it has a bathtub.  I think, though, they only want people to shower as there was no stopper in the tub.  Not to be denied my soak after several days of only showers, I took one of the plastic cups, turned it upside down over the drain and, voila!

It turned out to be a beautiful day — high of 26°C and sunny all day.  I even walked to a nearby store after checking in and picked up a simple supper for after my bath.  Tomorrow night — Charlotte, N.C.  So for now, Cheers from Jacksonville, Florida!