Day 41 Clearwater to St. Pete

We left Clearwater, Florida this morning after a (much needed) pump out of the holding tank. So far, Florida does the best job of providing pump out facilities. We are all in favor of not polluting, but several states that we passed through made little or no effort to enforce the laws...
     The trip went south along the Intracoastal Waterway between St. Petersburg Beach and St Petersburg to Tampa Bay where we turned east and north along the side of the bay to get to downtown St. Pete.

We went slower than usual to enjoy the scenery and the absolutely fantastic weather. I lost count of the number of bridges that we went under. As you can see from this picture, the clearance was often not more than 3 or 4 feet, but fortunately, we made it under all of them without having to wait for a scheduled opening of the bridge. Thus, the trip of only 36.4 miles took just over 5 hours. We are staying at the St. Pete City Marina right downtown.  The instructions from the marina said to enter on the south side of the "inverted pyramid" and that it would be easy to see/recognize.

.. and yes, they were right.  The building is at the end of what is known locally as "The Pier", and it contained five stories of shops, restaurants, bars, etc. until a month ago when it was closed and scheduled for demolition. It is scheduled to be replaced by another piece of art that would also include stores, entertainment, etc.  While in Clearwater, this building and its somewhat controversial replacement were in the news alot.

The fate will now be decided by a voters referendum. Can anybody spell "political football"??? That aside, we are on the edge of the downtown/waterfront area, which seems quite busy with restaurants, small stores and several very good museums. Just as a teaser, tomorrow morning we are going to the Dali Museum and then...

   Well after the beautiful, very relaxing cruise, of course, it was nap time... As luck would have it, when we got up, we discovered that there is a 20 screen movie theater just two blocks from the waterfront. We treated our movie withdrawal with "Monsters University". I quite enjoyed it, but the ending seemed quite lacking (?).

The final picture for today shows the Admiral posing with some street art outside the natural history musem, which is just outside the front gate of our marina. So far, we have plenty of things to do here tomorrow on our one full day.