Review of St. Petersburg, Florida
We took a somewhat unplanned trip to St. Petersburg, Florida hoping for a respite from an early winter arrival in Buffalo, NY.
Here is our review of St Petersburg, Florida.
We have winter here every year without fail but early last week I woke up and found myself scraping 10 inches of fresh snow from my automobile in order to show up at my thankless J.O.B. This was unusual for early/mid November but even more unusual was that it didn't melt the whole week. It just sort of packed down and turned into ice on every sidewalk and driveway, so Florida had to be better, right?
Why St. Pete?
Why not, right? We have always gravitated to the tried and true destinations of New Orleans and wine regions on the United States west coast like Sonoma and Willamette Valleys. We also have a couple of friends living in St. Pete (thank you, Donna, for fetching us from the airport) and we always appreciate some local knowledge and some tips on what to do and what to avoid. It seemed like a good time to try somewhere new and go to the beach for a few days. The famous St. Pete beach was about 10 miles from our little airbnb apartment in the historic Old Northeast section of the city, but apparently you can get on a cheap trolley from downtown that goes all the way out to the beach for about 2 bucks. This turned out to be a non-issue as it was too cold for the beach. Doh!
If you're planning on staying in an AirBnB here's a referral link for $55 off your first stay. I would get some money if you booked using the link. It's nice to have a little kitchen and fridge on the road where you can make some coffee and heat up leftovers versus having to get every meal out and about. Here's the link: Freddy's Big Referral Link.
1/2 price bottles of wine on Sundays!
How did it go?
We got in on Friday afternoon and our friend picked us up at Tampa Airport with some beverages in a cooler to take the edge off during the ride back to the apartment. That's always a classy move and I recommend offering your friends a road soda (beer) in the car when you pick them up from any airport. It's not like they're the ones piloting the automobile, right? Those pesky laws are only really suggestions I think. Color outside the lines once in awhile! Tell 'em Freddy said it was OK. We got to the place and got the key out of a lock box and opened a bottle of wine we bought at our connection in Baltimore Airport (BWI). We tried to hook up our devices to the Wi-Fi in the apartment but that didn't work and didn't work the whole damned weekend. The television was some kind of modern Wi-Fi only thing so we couldn't use that either for four days, but the price of the place was fairly cheap at a total cost of about $390 for 4 nights once you included all the bullshit fees and everything else. Still, as a non-smartphone person it sure is inconvenient not to have internet access. We decided to leave the internet issues for the next day and head out for something to eat.
We drove to downtown but walked the other days as it was only about 3/4 mile of pleasant walking. We weren't in the shorts and Aloha shirts we packed but had to wear the few regular northern clothes we packed due to the cold weather. We shared some fancy small plate food outdoors on a patio at some joint called Annata. That was a good start and a fine wine bar we returned to a couple of other times during the stay. Our friend had offered to stop at a grocery store for a couple of things on the way from the airport and we should have taken her up on that offer. It's nice to have things like a few cans of seltzer water and maybe a couple of extra bottles of wine and some breakfast food around but we got so excited we didn't do that. We'll make the stop the next time.
After our little dinner we went to a rooftop bar next door to check that out. It was kind of young and club-like and not really our scene but our other friend was waiting for a late arrival from the airport and was going to have a bonfire in the yard of the house she just bought so we chugged on up to her house. Thankfully our benefactor barely drinks anything as it was pretty far away. We picked up a couple of tourist priced bottles of wine to go up there so that's where that grocery stop would have come in handy. One thing I noticed is that St. Petersburg is a pretty large and sprawling city and much larger than I anticipated. We got to our other friend's place and made an evening by the fire with more wine and some fancy Irish Whiskey she had been saving for when non-rubes visited. We stayed there much too late and got an Uber ride home and that knucklehead driver wanted to stop for gas on the ride home. The cost is the same except for the cost to my patience at that point. Did I ever tell you the sharing economy sucks? You have fake cab drivers who don't know where they're going and fake hotels with no working Wi-Fi. I'm going back to regular hotels and old-school taxi cabs in the future, but if you like Uber and AirBnB go nuts with 'em! I will say the one AirBnB experience worth the effort was a little shared house with friends in Sonoma where everyone was together for social stuff. For me it makes much less sense for just a couple.
In the bird cage looking like Egon Schiele, who was always pulling down an eyelid.
We got as much rest as we could and woke up a little late on Saturday as we were supposed to meet up with our party pals for some fancy brunch at some fancy hotel. We walked downtown and got there ahead the them at the Vinnoy wearing the same clothes as Friday (and the rest of the trip) as it stayed cold outside the whole time. It turns out that fancy brunch was Sundays only so we paid and tipped our sweaty Russian waiter for our crappy drinks and got the hell out of there. We ended up at kind of a janky oyster shack nearby where the down and out crowd was hanging out. Our server was a real gem of rough around the edges and we liked all 5 foot nothing of her very much. We ate some oysters with Champagne and checked that off the list and then had to decide if we were napping before dinner or going as far and fast as we could go. Far and fast won the day so we hit a cocktail bar next door where the birdcage was hung. That was a pretty sweet dark place for day drinking but we limited ourselves to about 8 drinks each and headed home to rest up for dinner. We also met some eccentrics who insisted on buying more and more port wine and Sazerac cocktails. One of the eccentrics even insisted on hitting on our party friend even after she explained that her gayness was probably not a passing phase at age 41. The next Uber driver didn't know where the hell she was going to drop us off but we made it there in time to recharge for a dinner at hole in the wall steakhouse called Beau and Mo's Italian Steakhouse. It was expensive but worth it and Mrs. Smidlap and I tried to depart for the hacienda after dinner but the party people wanted to keep charging hard. We ended up the night at some dirty punk rock bar with some of the worst live music in the world. We like our punk and we like it bad but not that bad. It was late and the next day we had a whole day to ourselves.
Lizard with a straw on sidewalk.
Sunday was a recovery day from the start. It was still cold so we still couldn't go to the beach and I rigged up Mrs. Smidlap's phone to our laptop to watch the early football games on a stream while she walked downtown for some wine and to smooth out the rough edges of the previous day. She came home with some fancy Oregon Pinot Noir and the best treat of the weekend, foie gras two ways for me. It turns out she found her way to some gourmet wine shop/market called Baccus for all this stuff. I'm sure it all cost a fortune but who cares? It's foie! That food was perfect for a nap and after that we headed back down to the Annata wine bar for a light dinner. That's where we got to enjoy even more fancy wine for 1/2 the regular price while we had some little plates of pasta. Mine had stewed oxtail in it so how could you not order that? We walked home to rest after and Monday was going to be our last day.
Me with some biblical figures and some DNA. It's a Dali painting.
I promised Mrs. Smidlap we would definitely go to the Salvador Dali museum so we walked over there around noon on Monday. She warned me beforehand it was 25 bucks each to go into the place but it seemed important to her so my cheap ass went in there too. I have to say they had all the important and famous Dali works so it was worth the money considering Mrs. is a modern artist. We walked around town some more after deciding if we wanted to take the trolley out to the beach to at least view the thing but decided to just have a little lunch at a sidewalk cafe and a couple of glasses of wine. We had dinner plans later with yet another old pal so we were kind of taking it easy. While we were eating I ran into another eccentric from Montreal whom I met when he was heading into the apartment next door to ours that same morning. He sat down with us and we bought him a beer and he was asking us where all the gay clubs were located. It was tempting to tell him about the mythical Sodomy Saloon over on 8th Ave. but it just does not exist. We didn't know of a real gay spot but helped him sleuth it all out and then we headed back to the wine bar because it was on our way home. We were wrapping up our wine at Annata when we ran into the eccentric from the cocktail bar on Saturday. We bought him a beer and chatted a little more and he told us tales of forgetting where he left his bicycle in the past. He's from Holland so it's a big deal to lose track of your bike when you're Dutch. We headed home to wash up and take another Uber to dinner at a BBQ place near the major league ballpark.
We were pretty tired but I enjoyed meeting Mrs. Smidlap's old college classmate and his wife and the BBQ was pretty good. I had a couple of excellent margaritas and pork belly tacos and the other couple were non-drinkers so they gave us a ride home and saved us another Uber fare. We got up at the crack to dawn to tidy up the place and put the key back in the lock box and the Uber to the airport was already arranged the night before. Of course he couldn't find the address because the gig/sharing economy sucks. Uber even charged us an extra 2 bucks for "wait time" for something not our fault but we got to the airport on time and even saw some dolphins jumping in the bay while the sun was coming up. The other bonus was a direct flight home. We took off from Tampa at 8:15 and were on our couch in Buffalo by noon. You might not know what a treat that is if you live in a small market like ours and can rarely fly directly to/from most anywhere.
When I got back to work on Wednesday I sent a message to our AirBnB guy requesting a partial refund for the non-working internet and he refunded us $75. I guess that's fair. All in all St. Pete seemed like a very safe city. Even the down and out types were very harmless. The neighborhood where we stayed has high property values so we won't be buying a place there any time soon. Next time we'll probably rent a car and check out some surrounding communities like Sarasota. Hopefully if we get back we'll get to the beach and not need to wear the same clothes 4 straight days. I think we'll also make fewer formal plans that involve partying all day. That stuff will wring you dry and we're getting too old for this shit for days on end.
What do y'all think? Got any goofball AirBnB or Uber stories? You ever gone 4 days without an internet connection lately? We always try and take away a lesson from our travels and we learned more than one this time.
Related: AirBnB can #SuckleMe