Traveling the Florida Panhandle

Leaving Blue Spring State Park, we headed to another of Florida's excellent state parks, this one called Manatee Springs.  Oddly, this one didn't have nearly as many manatees as the Blue Spring one did - the count was down this year.  But we did see a few, and some very nice turtles as well as some good birds.  The biggest aggregation was the mass of turkey and black vultures that gathered in the park every night.  The trees were loaded with them at night, and it was hard to imagine what they could feed on, given the size and number of these birds.  But I guess that they forage far and wide.

We were at this park during our anniversary, which we celebrate on Valentine's Day.  For that occasion, we took a side trip to Gainesville, Florida to have dinner and see a performance of the Kingston Trio (as it is now constituted).  It was a blast from the past.  The original members of the trio are now either retired or dead, but there are some younger?! men doing the old songs with the same panache, along with jokes to appeal to the blue-haired audience.  "This is a song from 1963 - it's our most recent hit". 

While we were in Gainesville, we happened upon a exhibition at a museum on the University of Florida campus about cattle ranching in Florida, its history and traditions.  Cattle ranching, it turns out, gave rise to the term "cracker", which refers to the bullwhips used by drivers in Florida.  So there were demos of bullwhip technique, and you could try it out if you wanted (we didn't).  There were some fascinating exhibits of cattle ranch history, along with some regular exhibits at the same museum, one about fossils in Florida, and another about the huge statewide water flows today and the attempts to manage them and correct some of the past abuses. 

Another expedition from this park location was a trip down to Saint Petersburg to see the Dali Museum.  It turns out that the city houses the largest collection of works by Salvador Dali outside of Spain, and the city had just opened a new museum to house the collection in December of 2010.  We had missed that opening for various reasons, but were determined to see the museum and the collection, having viewed an earlier Dali exhibit in Atlanta.  So we made the run down to St Petersburg.

It was a lovely day, warm and sunny, and we got there early and toured the collection with the help of a well-informed and articulate docent, who guided our group around the museum.  He knew a lot about the life of Dali and the themes that were reflected in the paintings and helped us to understand the motifs and images that recur often in Dali's work, and the many stages of his artistic career.  Dali is a fascinating painter, and the collection is so extensive that we got to see how trends developed and matured in his work.

After our visit, Ivy toured a local garden complex while I had an afternoon nap.   The garden is in one of the famous Florida sinkholes, places where the limestone substrate has been eaten away and land has subsided into a huge pit.  These sinkholes are sometimes converted to parks and gardens, as they were here.

Leaving Manatee Springs, we headed off to the St George Island State Park, along the Gulf of Mexico across the Apalachicola Bay.  This is a really lovely state park that takes up one end of a long barrier island, with the rest of it taken up by rather upscale development and beach houses, lots of which are now for sale.  The beaches have some very nice shells to scrounge for, and there is good birding, particularly on the bay side where there are marshes.  There is also a bike trail that runs the length of the island to keep me busy on warm sunny days.  Our stay was rather uneventful, but filled with the kinds of activities we like best.  Ivy painted some, I went bike riding and we both hunted shells on the beach.  Weather was mostly very good, with some cooler times and fog now and then.

While we were there, we went in to the little town of Apalachicola, which is across the causeway on the other side of the bay.  We liked this town very much - it is just the sort of broken down, rather artsy beach town/fishing village that we dreamed about visiting when we started this trip.  This area of Florida, which bills itself as the Forgotten Coast, has  a great feel, not overdeveloped like so much of the state.  It also has some fabulous seafood, a lot of which is pulled out of the water right around here, and we got used to eating Gulf shrimp, a habit which we'll not be able to keep up. 

Our last stop in Florida was the St Andrews State Park, which is located right in the heart of Panama City and Panama City Beach, aka the Redneck Riviera.  It's a place with fabulous beaches and huge condo complexes, but marred by a general tackiness and devotion to T-shirt shops, tattoo parlors and gaudy miniature golf places and entertainment complexes.  The park itself was really lovely and pretty quiet, but with a weekend smattering of noisy young people.  There were some very cute deer in the park and lots of herons and egrets.  We did some shopping and some internet stuff, along with a bit of bird-watching, beach wandering and painting.  I took a couple of long bike rides along the waterfront.  And we got in a couple of movies.  The weather was sunny and nice.

From here we head off to Alabama and Louisiana for the Mardi Gras celebration.   We have been in Florida since around December 1, almost three months.  So the return trip is under way in earnest.  We even crossed a time zone boundary and are now on Central Time - one time zone closer to home.