Today is halfway through our stay at this site and also the whole trip. Doesn’t time fly…..
After the excitement of last night, we were up at the crack of dawn (0745) for the weekly breakfast. The clubhouse was noticeably empty this time compared with last weeks turn-out. I guess the late night put a few people off, after all it was almost 7:15 PM by the time the show finished last night.
Once breakfast had settled, we headed off to the beach, first stop the pier at St. Petersburg. I pumped the destination into the GPS and it dutifully asked me if I wished to avoid toll charges, to which I replied yes…….. a mistake!
The GPS had us heading north for longer than we expected, but slowly turned us in the general direction of the destination, smart GPS thinks I, it’s taking us the great circle route!
Well it continued to lead us past roads that we thought were the obvious choice to take, hindsight suggests a little more human input to the routing in future. We finally arrived at the pier, which is supposedly famous for it’s architectural design that is meant to resemble an upside down building… I’ll keep studying the photos, it may come to me. Following a wholesome Chinese lunch on the pier, and a bit of aircraft watching, we headed off to the other side of the peninsular to find some beaches. The beaches we found were great, nice soft sand and not very busy at all. We took a walk along them, in some ways they were little like the beaches in the Caribbean where resorts had their area of beach with loungers and water sports activities set up.
From here we set off to go home, we wanted to go via the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, which is a 5.5 mile bridge across Tampa Bay. This time we allowed the GPS to take us via the toll route, but also made a back up plan using the map. After a short fight with the GPS we coaxed it into going our route, not its. We had two toll charges, the first for about a mile of causeway that set us back a staggering .50c, and the second for the 5.5.mile bridge that cost $1.00. In Florida at least, I will let the GPS take us on toll routes 🙂