St Petersburg and the Dali Museum

Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, FL

We took off around noon for St Petersburg and the Dali Museum.  It was a bright and warm day.  To get to St Pete from Anna Maria, one drives over the skyline bridge.  This is one of the most beautiful bridges I've been on.  Also, it is an engineering marvel.  From the top one can see St. Pete, Tampa and also Anna Maria Island.  The beginning sections of the old bridge have been left for fishing.  

Skyline Bridge viewed from our car.

The Dali Museum is located on Old Tampa Bay and adjacent to the Mahaffay Theater on beautiful grounds.  The garden is designed in a Surrealistic manner with melting benches, a giant mustache and little surprising sculptures.  As soon as we arrived we realized it would be crowded; there was no parking remaining in the Museum garage.  We found parking near enough, though, and walked to the Museum to be greeted by a line that stretched around the side.  Wayne reminded me of my NMWA pass with reciprocity.  Sure enough the Dali was on the list and we were able to skip the line, the outside line.  Inside proved to have its own line that took about 20 minutes.  The place was packed everywhere:  shop, cafe, bathrooms and most of all the Picasso/Dali exhibit.  It was so difficult we decided to come back another day.  We stopped at the cafe for a delicious Cuba sandwich in the delightful garden.  By then it was 4:30 and the place seemed to have emptied.  So we went back to the exhibit and were able to enjoy it.  

The Picasso works were few and not all that intriguing.  One nice work was the Portrait of Olga, Picasso's first wife.  I was unfamiliar with the work. It's always nice to be surprised by something unknown.  Dali was a Fascist, which makes for a nasty taste when viewing his work.  But as George Orwell said, "One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draftsman and a disgusting human being.  The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other."

Olga by Pablo Picasso

Tropicana Field

Wayne outside the Dali Museum

The Dali Museum and Garden

St. Petersburg from the Dali Museum