Assignment: St. Petersburg » Unexpected

Greenpeace Ship Docked in St. Petersburg

Bob Horn — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 04:42:54 +0000

I was prowling along the waterfront south of downtown today, checking out the progress on the new Dali museum. As I drove a bit further, I saw something that caught my eye. So, I did a U turn and drove into the parking lot in the marine science area of USF Bayboro campus. Sure enough, there sat a Greenpeace ship, an icebreaker, complete with a helicopter on deck! Very unusual and intriguing to see this vessel docked in our city, but it turns out that we have no ice to break nearby and no whaling interventions. Rather, I learned, the ship is going to be used in the Gulf of Mexico for a protracted period, studying the long-term impact of the oil spill from the disastrous Deepwater Horizon incident. Seems like a mission that we can all embrace – I was happy to see them there! If you’d like to follow their progress firsthand, check out this link, which provides information and updates about this specific mission. (For a larger, higher resolution image, please click on the photo.)

Poignant Plaque

Bob Horn — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 01:30:58 +0000

This is usually a blog about St. Petersburg. I try to show you glimpses of the city, little snippets of life, places to go, whatever strikes me that feels like St. Petersburg that I think you might find interesting.

But, every once in awhile, I come upon something that is NOT in St. Petersburg that I just love so much that I want to publish it. Even though it’s NOT in St. Petersburg.

This photo is one such thing. I actually took this a few months back, and I’ve been trying to decide whether I wanted to venture away, even if only on occasion, from the purist stance of only talking about St. Petersburg. I decided that it was worth it!

This photo was taken in Leu Gardens in Orlando. There are several benches in the gardens, and it’s clear that people can purchase the right to place a memorial plaque on a bench if they’ve got a sentiment that they’d like to share. This one just stopped me in my tracks! The bench that the plaque is on is located in a beautiful, secluded area of Leu Gardens, which, by the way, is worth a visit if you’d like to see something other than Disney or Universal next time you’re in the area…

Leu Gardens bench (click on picture for larger image)

St. Petersburg — Big City With a Small Town Feel

Bob Horn — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 02:19:13 +0000

As I write my posts each day and I wonder what I’m going to write about tomorrow, there are all sorts of topics and ideas that jump into my head. I’ve written about a lot of St. Petersburg places and events, I’ve shown sunrises and sunsets, I’ve mentioned some history, and I have hundreds of ideas of other things to write about, so I don’t think I’m going to have any problems coming up with material. But I was reminding myself today, as I drove home and was thinking about a post, that one of my motivations in writing this blog is to give people who might not be St. Petersburg residents a picture, over time, of what it’s like to live here. To do that, I need to keep writing about the things that I already have in my head, but I think that I also need to give some more glimpses of the little snapshots of life that happen here and there around the city, the sorts of things that make St. Petersburg so easily feel like home to me.

So, with that thought in mind, I’ll keep my eyes open and keep my camera handy in the weeks and months to come. But it struck me that I already have a picture that I can show you that gives just such a glimpse into St. Petersburg life. This is a photograph that I took a few months ago, in my own neighborhood. I was out for a Saturday morning walk, just enjoying the beauty of the day and, honestly, thinking about what a nice neighborhood we live in. I reached an intersection and started to turn to the right, but, for some reason, I glanced to the left, and something caught my eye. I walked about a half a block and I saw what you see in the photo below!

I have to tell you that the reality was every bit as good as it looks. The grill was sitting in front of a house that had just been sold. The owners had been moving out over the previous couple of days. I suppose that they must have been moving into a condo, where they had no use for a grill. They could have tried to sell it, but instead, they stuck it out by the street with a ‘Free Grill’ sign on it! I felt a little bit like Opie walking through Mayberry. I happily interrupted my walk, wheeled it home, tested it out, and it worked perfectly. And still does. It’s a Weber charcoal grill, but it has a propane tank and an auto-igniter so that you just fill it with charcoal, then press the igniter button and it lights the charcoal automatically via a propane powered flame. When the coals are lit, you turn off the gas.

On my way home with it, there was a guy installing Verizon Fios who saw me wheeling it home and he saw the sign. He told me that he owned that exact same grill model and he loved it! I actually looked it up online when I got home, and it is a current model, still being sold today in stores for $300!

What’s the moral of this story? I certainly can’t tell you that there’s a free grill around every corner in St. Petersburg. But this is the sort of thing that allows a big, busy, modern city to still retain that homey, small town feeling. And this sort of neighborly kindness is not unique to my particular neighborhood. This is St. Petersburg…

Where the Wild Things Grow

Bob Horn — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:12:51 +0000

Florida – named La Florida, or ‘place of flowers’, by Juan Ponce de Leon when he landed near St. Augustine in 1513. Florida is known for our flora, and for the fact that you can always find lush plants growing and flowers blooming, year round. St. Petersburg, situated as far south as we are in the state, has pretty much never-ending color from all of the various types of flowers that grow here. As you drive around the city, you see gardens in bloom everywhere – in homeowners’ front yards, in landscaping for office complexes, on school grounds, and in parks. There’s even a City of St. Petersburg Rose Garden on 16th Street North.

But what’s fun to me, and what really proves how hospitable our climate is for growing things, is when I discover something wild growing, something completely untended, but beautiful. It happens all over the city – you just have to look for it. I spotted these wild Poinsettias growing just a few feet from Boca Ciega Bay, in Jungle Prada Park. There were lots of them, growing in and among the rocks and other shore plants. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a wild Poinsettia – I’m used to the ones that only bloom in December. But I learned that this wild variety, which typically blooms from June through September, grows from Virginia down to the bottom of the Florida peninsula.

Wild Poinsettias