A couple of weeks ago, we spent the long weekend on a stretch of the Florida Suncoast, where our good friends had moved a couple of years ago.
The trip was meant as a friendly reunion, to be spent mostly by the pool or on the beach. I explicitly considered and rejected the notion of bringing my rather bulky enthusiast-grade camera along, since there were no expectations of significant opportunities for travel photography of the kind that I usually do.
Of course, I don’t really do lazy vacations, even short ones. So, on one of the days, I simply left everyone to their lounging and drove to St. Petersburg for a museum visit and a bit of local exploration.
And immediately regretted leaving my trusted camera at home. I may be at best a middling photographer when equipped with a Sony Alpha, but I am decidedly terrible when taking snapshots with a phone. Nonetheless, as a not-yet-famous proverb suggests, if a journey takes place and no pictures of it are posted online, it did not happen. I absolutely cannot have that – so here is a selection of pictures.
Starting with a few fragments of downtown St. Petersburg.
Several towns on the Suncoast are named after grand Italian cities (Venice, Naples), while St. Petersburg was actually named after the imperial Russian capital. A heritage sign marks the spot of the first railroad depot in town, built in 1889 by a Russian-noble-turned-American-entrepreneur Peter Demens, one of the city founders.
The building in the shot above houses the excellent James Museum of Western & Wildlife Art, a superb collection of Native American, frontier, and wildlife paintings & sculpture. I am rarely all that excited about contemporary sculpture, but the execution and level of detail of various artworks on display here are simply amazing.
Many of the paintings are brilliant and vivid, and each is accompanied by an information plaque providing context that, in aggregate, makes for an in-depth historical and cultural excursion.
There are also a few more abstract works by Native American artists, as well as other types of artifacts, such as figurines, masks, or jewelry.
A separate room is given to the paintings of the animal world, somewhat curiously dominated by portraits of species not native to North America.
A temporary exhibition of wolf-tracking photography was a fascinating bonus.
Outside on St. Petersburg’s waterfront, here is a perspective towards another impressive art gallery, the Dalí Museum.
Billed as the largest collection of the painter’s works outside of Spain, it is, for my taste, a bit overpriced with respect to what it offers, but anyone with an affinity for the unique style of Dalí will undoubtedly find it rewarding.
A couple of media-enriched bonuses make the Dalí nearly worth the cost of entry. There is “augmented reality” – you point your phone at a so-designated painting, and individual parts of it come to life, further enhanced by contextual information. Also, you can put on VR goggles for a 3-minute-long immersion into Dalí’s world – walking under his spindle-legged elephants was almost certainly the biggest highlight of my visit.
Here is the marina view from the museum’s atrium. The painted sphere to the right is an additional attraction called Dalí Alive 360, which requires an extra fee, but was not in operation during our visit.
In the museum garden, there are a couple of additional Dalí-themed installations.
All those shots related to St. Petersburg – and we were actually based in suburban Sarasota, a 45-minute drive southward. Ironically, while we took advantage of a number of activities available in the area, we did not really explore the town of Sarasota all that much. Except for the phenomenal attraction that is the Ringling.
The vast park-and-museum complex on the Sarasota waterfront is the onetime estate of John Ringling, of Ringling Brothers fame, and his wife Mable. Having purchased the 20-acre property in 1911 as their “winter” home, they developed it into a magnet for visitors, full of art and nature, thus making a fundamental contribution to putting Sarasota – before then, a nondescript fishing village – on the map as a destination. In his will, Ringling bequeathed his estate to the people of Florida, and the complex is now among the most visited attractions on the Suncoast.
After such a grand introduction, you would expect a fair number of visuals, wouldn’t you? Alas, this is where not having what I consider the proper photographic equipment reduced the publishable output to a rather pitiful volume. In the amazing and unique Circus Museum – especially around its unbelievably detailed model of a traveling circus campus – I did not judge either the lighting or the angles as workable with a phone camera. Within the confines of Ca’ d’Zan mansion, aware that even when I do have my camera, I rarely produce exceptional interior shots, I did not even try. And in the galleries of the Art Museum, which boasts an excellent collection of classical art, the only shot worth keeping – featuring one of my all-time favorite painters, Canaletto – came out of my better half’s phone camera.
I did photograph various angles of the wonderful Italianate garden of the Art Museum, so here you go.
The exterior of Ca’ d’Zan (in Venetian, it means “House of John”) – a veritable Mediterranean Revival masterpiece.
And the eye-catching clusters of the Banyan trees found throughout the property.
One single other Sarasota-tagged shot is this fragment of St. Armands Circle, the popular open-air mall on one of the Keys off the Sarasota coast.
We definitely spent more time on the beach at nearby Siesta Key than in Sarasota proper.
On one occasion, while getting food from a beach shack, we were accosted by a bird, which the internet tells me is a specimen of Yellow-crowned Night Heron.
On another occasion, a sand sculpture of an octopus survived the day long enough to greet an evening beach arrival.
These last few pictures again belong to my better half’s hand. She never misses an opportunity to document a lovely sunset.
Lovely places. Lovely company. Lovely time. Notwithstanding my photographic-equipment misery.