Earlier this month, my mom and I took a road trip from Tampa to Fort Lauderdale. I was in Tampa for a training and we drove to Key West and back to Fort Lauderdale to fly out to New Orleans. The vacation really started in St Pete’s Beach. It was my first time in Florida and a quick overview, not quite a week.

St. Pete Beach | The Dalí Museum | Don Cesar Hotel | Anna Maria | Siesta Key | Edison & Ford Winter Estates

St Pete’s Beach

St. Pete’s Beach is about 30 miles from Tampa, and can take more than an hour to drive there, depending on the time of day. Across Tampa Bay, St. Pete’s Beach is about 20 miles west from St. Petersburg on the Pinellas peninsula. Our first stop was St. Pete’s Beach. Located on a barrier island, it is a coastal resort city off of the Gulf of Mexico.

The Dalí Museum

We drove into St Petersburg to visit the Dali Museum and to see the town a bit.

About Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) was fascinating, one of the artists probably everyone studied in art history. Born in Figueres, Spain, where he built a home for his work, he learned French at Hispano-French School of the Immaculate Conception. In 1929, he met a group of Surrealists through Joan Miró and by then he already held exhibitions in Spain. This was also the year he met his future wife, Gala, and had his first individual exhibition. Perhaps his most well-known and iconic work is The Persistence of Memory, which was first shown in Paris in 1931. His dream-like and distorted imagery. Melting pocket-watch. This piece is part of the MOMA collection in New York.

While he was known for this Surrealistic painting, he was also expelled from the group, before which he had already begun to be interested in psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud. They met in 1938.

Dalí continued to explore different themes in his work, painting increasingly less after Gala’s death in 1982.

Here is a more detailed timeline Dalí’s life and his bio from the Dalí Museum in St Petersburg.

The museum opened in 1982, from A Reynolds and Eleanor Mose’s collection of his works. Their first purchase was in 1943, Daddy Longlegs of the Evening, Hope! (1940) and the couple met the artist and his wife soon after that. There is now over 2,400 works in all the medium that Salvador Dalí used. We may know him for his Surrealist paintings. However, he was a writer, sculptor, and illustrator.

In 2011, the new building opened. The geodesic glass bubble, called Enigma, was constructed from 1,062 triangular pieces of glass. With the highest point at 75 feet, Enigma is a nod to the dome of Dalí’s museum in Spain. In the 1940s, Salvador Dalí began his mystical and nuclear period (see Mystical Manifesto), with interests in the DNA molecule and its double helix. Inside the museum, a centrepiece is a helical staircase.

When we visited, the picasso / dalí, dalí / picasso exhibition (November 8, 2014 – February 22, 2015) was still on. It is a collaboration between the Dalí Museum and the Museu Picasso in Barcelona. This exhibition shows 80 works, from twenty-plus museums and private collectors around the world.

From the Dalí Museum:

The story of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí is one of influence, rivalry, and artistic greatness. This exhibition presented these two giants of modern art who changed the way we understand images and the role of the artist. They were presented side by side in this exhibit, perhaps for the first time.

This exhibition showed how these artists were shaped by the currents of their time. Yet, their individual and insistent reactions to these currents inspire us all to find our own ways. Each artist, drawing his art from an interior and personal vision, tried to rescue the power of art from meaningless invention. In so doing they changed the ways that art was understood.

A true painter is one who can paint extraordinary scenes in the middle of an empty desert. A true painter is one who can patiently paint a pear in the midst of the tumults of history.

Salvador Dalí

Don Cesar Hotel

When I looked for the next stop after Tampa, I knew it had to be St. Pete’s Beach, because of its location and Don CeSar Hotel, which is a stunning sight. I really wanted to be at the beach, to see the sunsets and smell the ocean.

Don CeSar Hotel is a landmark in St. Pete’s and was known as the playground for the rich and famous in the Jazz Age of the 1920s and 1930s. Opened in 1928, known as the “Pink Palace”, its flamingo-pink Moorish-style architecture is an iconic sight and stands facing the ocean. Don CeSar is a love story, first as the vision of a sandcastle of New York architect Thomas Rowe, who purchased 80 acres of land, including seven miles of beaches. The sand here is warm, soft, and fine.

The resort hotel was named after Don César de Bazan, from the British opera “Maritana.” The heroine of this opera is who Thomas Rowe built his “Pink Lady” as a tribute to – his lost love, Lucinda de Guzman. The story is that while they were in love, her parents did not approve and took her back to Spain. True of epic ghost stories, she died of a broken heart and Thomas’ letters to her returned unopened. Was this all a true story or one conceived by the hotel’s marketing department?

It indeed is a beautiful hotel. I especially loved watching the sunsets standing with my toes dug into the soft white sand. A keystone memory for me. Walking around the hotel, though, I had a certain feeling. Having worked for a hotel, I am not surprised to learn of hauntings. It still surprises me that we actually don’t think about how many deaths have occurred at hotels, especially old ones with a long history. Researching the hotel afterwards led me to stories of haunting at Don CeSar. Unsurprinsgly, it was used as a military hospital in the 1940s during the war. You can join a ghost tour, which includes the hotel.

From St Pete’s to Delray Beach

From St Pete’s Beach, we took the day to drive down to Edison & Ford Winter Estates. Without stopping, it’s about 111 miles or under two hours. We did detour to Anna Maria and down the keys off the coast. The additional driving added over 2.5 hours, which was so worth it. It was beautiful, even if overcast that day.

Driving on I-275, we then went back over to the peninsula and crossed Lower Tampa Bay via the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, a long cable-stayed concrete bridge. It was a cloudy day with very interesting cloud patterns. It was very picturesque to drive over, parts of the bridge are just above the water.

Anna Maria

Anna Maria is a barrier island off the coast of Bradenton. One of its landmarks is the city pier, which was built in 1911.

We stopped at the Anna Maria City Pier Restaurant for some clam chowder. It was low-key and laid back and had interesting decor. It wasn’t the best chowder I’ve had (too salty). Still, it was time for a stop, with only me driving and both of us needing a meal. The restaurant sits at the T-end of the pier, several hundred feet from shore. So it was quite a view.

(Updated 2024: Due to the damage from Hurricane Irma in 2017, the old pier was torn down and rebuilt at a reported $6.8 million, reopening in June 2020. The new place is the City Pier Grill and Bait Shop. You can still check out photos and information about the pier prior to the rebuild on their The Old Anna Maria City Pier before 2020 FB page.)

Siesta Key

After lunch we continued our drive south. We stopped in Siesta Key, which is almost an hour away, and then Venice Beach, another half hour further. I love being barefoot in the sand and since I was the one driving the whole trip, I was free to stop for a break and to take photographs of the beautiful landscapes as they appeared. Taking extra time to drive through these barrier islands is definitely worth it.

We walked down the path to Siesta Beach. The skies were dark and stormy on the southern end of the beach while it was bright and light at the other.

(the bottom two photos are at Venice Beach further south on the coast)

Edison & Ford Winter Estates

Fort Myers was our last stop on the Gulf of Mexico side of Florida before we drove across the state for Delray Beach and the rest of the Atlantic coast cities on the next part of the roadtrip.

I didn’t know what to expect here and enjoyed my afternoon here, taking my time to browse the Museum’s exhibits, which included many stories about the families and their guests.

Here’s my post on edison & Ford Winter Estates & a bit about Fort Myers.

Fort Myers to Key West

Fort Myers is about a two-hour drive from St. Petersburg. From here, you can take the Key West Express catamaran directly to Key West. It’s a 3.5 to 4 hours on aferry ride. From December to April, you can also sail out of Marco Island. This may be the right option for us on another trip. This time, I just wanted to drive down Florida Keys. We also had plenty of time before the Tucson Gem Show, which we were attending from January 18 to February 1.

☞ The Key West Express IMO is 9348895. With this number you can locate the craft on Vessel Finder, Marine Vessel Traffic, and other websites.

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