A Foray Into Florida

All photos by me

Life's been busy since the school year started for us. First I had to get the school year underway, and then I was busy training for and walking the Hood River Half Marathon--which ties, I'd say, with the North Olympic Discovery Half Marathon for the most beautiful course. And then we had a delightful visit from my brother and his 18-month old twins. And then I was off to Florida for meetings and a conference of chief academic administrators. 

Whew.

And the destination, to be exact, was St. Petersburg Beach.

I was excited about this trip because I've never been to the west coast of Florida before. My [vast] experience with Florida has been confined to Orlando-ish regions. The beach sounded great to me!

I decided to stay at the hotel where the meetings were held--the Tradewinds Resort. To keep down expenses I shared a suite with two other colleagues, one from Alberta, Canada, and one from the Napa valley in California. We had a rollicking good time, them being English teachers by discipline. When hanging out with other women who enjoy Hyacinth Bucket (I mean, "Boo-KAY"), there is no other option but a rollicking good time.

Walks on the beach, of course, were a must, as were visits to restaurants serving ethnic food. In my remote corner of Washington state, the only ethnic options are Mexican, Chinese and Thai. While at St. Petersburg Beach I got to go out for dinners at Greek, Thai and Indian. Heavenly!

The meetings themselves were very good. I reconnected with an old classmate from Harvard Institute for Educational Management; he and I have made it a yearly appointment to get together for coffee at these meetings. Our shared context of Christian higher education bonded us as classmates at Harvard, and we've been able to swap encouragement over time. This time it was bittersweet; he was just named the new president of a college in Ohio, so he will be moving into a different set of duties and meetings now.

Nevertheless, there were other connections to be made, ideas to be swapped, and people to meet. Meetings like this are good because you hear the latest and you realize that everyone is dealing with the same challenges you have at your school. There's something to be said for shared misery as well as shared triumphs.

On the next-to-last day of meetings, my two suite-mates and I decided to skip the afternoon workshops and get some culture. So off we went to discover the Salvador Dali museum in St. Petersburg. (For those who, like me, are unaware, St. Petersburg is the bigger city, and St. Petersburg Beach is the smaller town strung out along what is basically a long sandbar that's built up across the bay from St. Petersburg.)

The Dali museum is of lovely modern architecture, looking like a cube dropped into a bubble. In the picture above, not one of those triangular window panes is exactly the same dimensions as any other.

The spiral staircase in the atrium of the museum goes up three stories. The place is beautifully laid out, with lines to please the eye wherever you look. Architect Yann Weymouth, in my opinion, was brilliant in designing the building. The staircase, for example, was designed to resemble a string of DNA, a scientific phenomenon that intrigued Dali and showed up in his art.

Photographs are not allowed in the galleries, so you'll have to make do with pictures from the atrium and outside the museum. But the paintings are interesting, and in some cases gruesome. In my opinion, artists are typically an unusual and often tortured bunch of people who are inordinately self-absorbed, and it shows in their work. We took the recorded guided tours (a player and headphones for each person), which was very helpful in explaining the life and work of the artist, and what was being portrayed in the paintings. I'm a bit too culture-poor to pick up on the meanings myself, were I to just stand back and look.

Of course one of Dali's most famous paintings is the one called "The Persistence of Memory," which depicts wilted clock faces in a barren landscape. In the garden, looking at a depiction of one of those clocks on a twisted garden bench, we three administrators decided we must demonstrate just what administration does to a good woman!

One of the lovely things about visiting Florida in November is that the weather is pleasant and the flowers still blooming. The days were not too hot and the nights not too cool. And best of all were the palm trees. They always delight my soul.

And it's always fun to try something you've never done before when you're visiting a new-to-you city. Joy from Canada joined me in going for our first ever Segway tour, this one of St. Petersburg. Once we got a bit of training in the parking lot, we were off to see the town, the pier and the palm gardens. These are wonderful devices, these segways. I highly recommend--should you be where such a tour is offered--that you give it a whirl.

Despite the busy days in meetings, and the busy evenings networking with colleagues from across the country, my foray into Florida was a lovely break from the daily grind of committees, personnel issues to solve, and tasks to be done. It seems quite surreal, a couple of weeks later when it's below freezing with snow flurries outside. It was very good.

To paraphrase Hycinth Bucket in summary, "It's been a fun day, but we must press on."