6/30/02 | An elite seat in St. Pete

You gotta like a place with a name like "Pete". Oh, sure, officially it's St. Petersburg, but practically nobody, including the nice guy at the Chamber of Commerce who filled a bag with brochures and maps for us, calls it that. Friends had disparaged the entire west coast of Florida as "old-people country", and there are certainly lots of "over-55 communities" clustered in the 'burbs here, but there is a large contingent of twenty-somethings as well, due to a University of South Florida campus downtown. A sort of upscale open-air mall complex called Baywalk is just a block from the waterfront, and the entire downtown area is chockablock with restaurants, museums, and the sort of shop where we enjoy windowshopping but are too scared to do more than take quick glances at the price tags. Condos in the elegant waterfront towers start at close to half a million dollars. But from our slot on the transient dock of the Municipal Marina, we get the exclusive bay view and the convenience of being in downtown St. Petersburg, for only about 20 dollars a day. You might call it an elite seat in St. Pete.

apres moi, le deluge...

Mornings tend to be pleasantly cool here, and we get most of our boat projects done in the morning. After lunch, though, we start to swelter. Although our awnings help with the heat, we don't have much of an air conditioner, just one cold-air blower which runs from our refrigerator compressor, which is enough to take the edge off in the main salon but not nearly enough to cool the whole boat. So afternoons are usually spent doing web research at the USF library, going to the movies, or visiting museums -- anywhere we might find a bit of air conditioning! In the early evening the thunderstorms usually move in, and they are darned impressive. The thunder crackles and roars, the lightning flashes across the whole sky. And then there's the rain. It really knows how to rain here! No dribbles and drabbles of showers here; when the skies open up, the water comes down in a relentlessly pounding stream, like somebody opened up a bunch of celestial firehoses. When you're caught out, you can't do anything but wait for the rain to stop, or at least slow down, and it might be a long wait. No matter how fast you run from one store awning to the next, you are instantly and completely drenched. Sometimes the cooling rain lasts only a few hours, sometimes it continues on into the night. But every morning, the sun rises in a clear and bright sky, the rain only a sparkling memory on the grass.

We have nearly caught up on our movie-watching, one thing we really missed in the Caribbean. We also watched a parade of tall ships come in for an event called "America's Sail". Actually, there were far more local boats out trying to get in the way of the tall ships than there were actual tall ships -- two "Class A", or real "ship-y" ships, and a half-dozen smaller schooners. (We got more tall-ship watching in two years ago at OpSail in Portland, Maine.) And, speaking of watches, we visited the Dali museum, which does not have his famous melty watch painting, but which does have an impressive collection of his other work. The museum convinced us that Dali was 1) an artistic genius, and 2) loony as a pocketful of Canadian coins.

Bench outside the Dali Museum

We pulled out our poor bicycles, which have been languishing unused for nearly a year. It took a bit of work (and a visit to a bike shop for parts, notably a new chain to replace my completely rusted one), but we are now mobile again. What a joy it is to be on a bicycle again! Now I wish we'd used them more in the Caribbean, although I can really think of only a few places where riding would have been practical and safe. After an exasperating day of riding buses (as is typical in the US, indirect routes, infrequent schedules, and incomplete coverage meant that it took us about three times as long to do our errands as it would have in a private car) we shelled out the $2 each for bikes-on-buses permits. Now we can use the bikes in combination with the buses, which should give us a little more versatility. (That's the one thing that the US does better; we have noticed that most urban buses have bike racks.) In the downtown area, the bikes are just as fast as cars, without the associated parking hassles. Even the St. Pete police use bicycles for patrolling downtown. We were amused to see that they don't bother carrying bike locks -- see photo for details!

Our "to-do" list is rather scary, but we're slowly chipping away at it. We've decommissioned a few systems, such as the watermaker, and begun cleaning out the lockers. The winches have all been cleaned and lubricated. We still haven't picked a boatyard for hauling out and storage, but we're getting closer to that decision.

One big task was to buy a vehicle; we had decided that since we weren't quite sure where we'd be going, it made sense to buy a small RV so we wouldn't be dependent on hotels and restaurants. We spent several days visiting dealers, sifting through the classifieds, and staring at web pages -- sort of a crash course in Motorhome 101 -- and finally settled on a 1988 24' Class A style. True to our cruising background, the brand is...Gulfstream! We won't actually have it until next week, but having wheels will make many of our remaining tasks easier. Now all we have to do is stop having fun here in St. Petersburg, and buckle down to work.