Okay, I’m taking this one day at a time.

We woke up fairly early on Saturday, and again we “hit” the gym followed by the Doubletree Breakfast Buffet.  The day before we had gone straight to breakfast in our workout clothes and today was the same.  We also had the same server, Jesus, who teased us about this, but seriously, it didn’t make sense to shower and change before eating.  Now, for the record:  since January I have been working with a personal trainer and have been on a very strict diet.  For this trip I had decided that I was going to eat basically what I wanted.  Oddly, it has been a real challenge, full of guilt and self-loathing!  I decided to stick to the basic diet for breakfast and lunch and really only “splurge” at dinner, but they did offer bacon on the breakfast buffet, so I might have taken a small piece of it.  Other added bonus:  unlimited coffee, plus Jesus brought us “to-go” cups so we could take it along, which was great.  In fact, we were really starting to get in the mood for cruising with his fantastic service.

After breakfast we drove across the bridge to St. Petersburg again.  This time a HUGE thunderstorm came through just as we started out, and the visibility was rotten.  The Kia doesn’t handle that well in bad weather either, so it was a little scary for a few minutes.  Our goal today:  visit the Salvador Dali Museum, then meet up with Ginny again.  Several years ago Chris and I spent a whole week on vacation in St. Petersburg, and our favorite place had been the museum, so we were looking forward to returning!

It took awhile for the rain to calm down enough to get to the museum, and we were a bit soaked by the time we walked in.  The museum was great!  Dali is such an interesting and crazy man.  We weren’t as impressed by the museum as we had been last time though–I think there must have been a more interesting traveling exhibit at that time.  This time it was about Dali’s work with the theatre.  All in all though, the museum is still fantastic.  They are in the process of constructing a new building which will be both larger and more hurricane proof, so it will only be better!  Evidently they have many more works of arts in storage at any given time, and with the new building will be able to have a larger exhibit.  We’ll have to return in a few years to check it out.

Afterwards we had a quick lunch at a place downtown called the Lucky Dill Deli.  They served gigantic sandwiches.  We then met up with Ginny.  Since the weather was still a bit ominous we decided to go to a movie.  We saw “Salt” with Angelina Jolie.  It was entertaining enough (the others liked it much better than I did) and then we went to dinner.  Ginny drove us out to St. Petersburg Beach to a seafood restaurant–Hurricane Seafood Restaurant (technically in Pass-a-Grille).  I had a stuffed flounder and it was delicious.  The pina coladas weren’t as good (in my opinion) as the previous night.  After dinner it was dark and we debated going to walk on the beach, but we decided we would have lots of beach time ahead, and frankly we were exhausted at this point.  We hung out with Ginny at her house a bit longer, then back to the hotel.  Tomorrow would be the big day!!!!