New Year, New Trip

Our journey begins on New Year's Day. We leave Anchorage just before our driveway becomes too slick to walk on. The first flight is your typical flight out of Alaska. First class is filled with oil field workers who don't live in Alaska. There big dogs and little dogs. There are bags of McDonalds. There are lots of carry-ons. Not so typical: bad turbulence on takeoff. Scary bad. Nevertheless, we make it to Seattle.

The flight from Seattle to Orlando seems to be part of a parallel universe. The only people in first class are couples (one of whom also has a screaming baby). Yes, this is an overnight flight.

Travel tip: If you are traveling with anyone under, say, ten, and especially under two, bring a bag full of stuff: snacks, toys, games, blankets, more toys, stuffed animals, bottles, and maybe a little Benadryl.

Here is something you will NEVER see on a flight in or out of Alaska.

It is an EMPTY overhead bin . . . after everyone has been seated. Really.

Eventually we get to Orlando and it is Saturday morning. We pick up a car and drive to St. Pete to visit the Dali Museum.  (We had been to the Dali Museum in Figueres, Spain, and were so impressed we wanted to see more.  ADD LINK)

The building itself is very interesting and the architecture is really part of the homage to Dali.

The exhibit was excellent. We learned a lot from the audio tour. Here is one of Dali's early works. The woman is his sister.

This painting shows Dali's wife, Gala, and it is called "Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea Which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln." Dali was experimenting with the concept of the minimum number of pixels it takes to portray a human face. ADD LINK TO Dali Museum in Spain

This painting is called "The Hallucinogenic Toreador." It shows a number of figures of Venus de Milo. If you focus on the green you will see that it is the tie of the matador. His chin, mouth and nose appear on the torso of the Venus with the green skirt.

Read more about Dali at thedali.org.

Today was also the last day of an Escher exhibit at the Dali. You may know that Escher was also fascinated with optical illusions, Möbius strips, and tesselation. It was an excellent exhibit, but it was so crowded that it was very difficult to see everything. It's nice that so many people will come out to see this type of a museum. (It's not cheap, either.) ADD LINK

If you are in the Tampa/St. Pete area, The Dali is a MUST.

After the museum we headed to Bradenton and our motel. We are in the midst of a large mall. There is another mall across the street, another mall down the road, and a fourt mall just on the other side of the highway. They all seem to be very crowded. 

We had a late lunch at Five Guys. It's a hamburger/fries chain. The burgers are perfect. You can get them with any combination of toppings you want. But they are famous for their fries. A "little" was more than I could eat. No dinner for us tonight.

Zzzzzzzz. Jet lag. Zzzzzzzz.