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St. Petersburgh Grand Prix
Saturday, March 1 2025
location: room 107, St. Pete Beach Suites, St. Pete Beach, Pinellas County, Florida
I awoke with a somewhat bad sunburn on my left upper arm and a milder burn across my face and legs. So I slathered on a bunch of sunscreen and decided to stay in the shade as much as possible today.
After I drank a large amount of Eight O'Clock coffee and eating mediocre vegan baked goods, I joined Gretchen in going to the beach. This time we had a bigger, less-janky umbrella, and I brought a real printed book, as I was finding my phone's screen impossible to read even in the shade on the beach. On the give-a-book/take-a-book shelf of the hotel, there had been only three books: one in German, one in Spanish, and one in English. I took the one on English, Dancing at the Rascal Fair, about Scottish immigrants to Montana, and the little of it that I read was okay, but I kept getting distracted from my reading. One of the things I did soon after we set up on the beach was to build a couple foot stools out of sand so that we could be a bit more comfortable as we sat in our beach chairs. At some point Gretchen went off on a long walk by herself, and then I went to the room briefly because I had to use the facilities. Later Gretchen went for a fairly long swim in the gulf, which she found perfectly comfortable once she'd acclimated to its temperature. As she was returning from her swim, she saw that a guy who had set up a beach tent blocking our view of the surf was about to light a cigar. Appalled, she asked him if he really was going to like that cigar. When he said he was, she said of course he was, because he's the kind of guy who thought nothing of blocking our view of the ocean. Then she mumbled something about being pretty sure she knew whom he had voted for. By that point I'd had enough of the beach anyway, so we uprooted our umbrella and headed back to the hotel, where the poolside was a perfectly good substitute for the beach.
I actually spent the next hour or so in the room with my laptop on my lap, but at some point I decided I should do more to enjoy the benefits of being in Florida. So I took my laptop out to the pool. I saw a woman reading a book on a floaty thing and she initially looked enough like Gretchen from behind for me to say something overly-familiar to her, but she ignored me, which was for the best. I then struggled to use my laptop in the outdoor glare, which made the cursor particularly hard to see, especially when it was floating over a document in HomeSite, the ancient application I still use for all my web writing. As I was doing these things, I was drinking a cocktail of cold coffee mixed with vodka I'd smuggled onto the airplane.
Further into the afternoon, we began another downtown-St.-Petersburg afternoon. This time, though, Gretchen called up a Lyft. We ended up with a chatty African American driver who was telling us all about the various St. Petersburg festivals, and how some of the older people are a little too old to be getting as messed up as they do. In particular, he mentioned something called Gasparilla. But this weekend St. Petersburg was hosting its annual Grand Prix, an actual road race somehow held on the streets of the city. I wondered how that was possible, what with the inevitable crashes that would then be happening into, well, storefronts, but apparently that's not enough of a problem to keep it from being a St. Petersburg institution.
We got out at the Museum of Fine Art, where A, our neighbor back in Hurley, has a sister C who works as a curator. C wasn't there today, but she'd left a note at the front desk comping us free tickets to the museum. So we strolled through to look at what they had. It was a good mix of historical styles, most of artists we'd never heard of. So we joked that the Impressionist paintings were done by off-brand Impressionists. There were a few paintings by famous people, including a Monet and several Georgia O'Keeffes. There was also an ongoing exhibit of Ansel Adams photographs that we checked out.
I'm always drained after slow walking through a museum, so when Gretchen suggested we take a ride on a free trolley that circles through downtown, I was happy to do that. As we passed beneath the towering downtown office buildings, we could occasionally hear the roar of engines. They were coming from the Grand Prix, which was in progress. The cars were following a strange boot-shaped course that use First Street, Bay Shore Drive, and one of the runways of a tiny airport on the edge of the harbor, a course they would follow for one hundred laps. We rode the trolley back to where it had picked us up and then briefly attempted to watch the Grand Prix from the accessible parts of Bayshore Drive, but to get beyond a certain point, one had to have certain wristband. As we walked along the edge of cordon, we kept encountering incredibly well-dressed people, apparently there for the Grand Prix. At some point we got a glimpse of some of the race cars as they rounded a bend and noisily headed on another monotonous circuit. That was all we needed to see to feel like we'd had the complete experience.
We then walked all the way to Good Intentions, where we'd be having another meal. This time we had a different waitress, though one with a similar physique and demeanor to the one we'd had yesterday. It was after 6:00pm, so the menu was different. We decided to split two entrees: a mofongo platter and bucatini with crimini sauce. For starters, Gretchen got some very fragrant brussel sprouts and I got a platter of various vegetables and crackers to be dipped in a faux fish sauce. I also ordered the Green Bench Turbid #7 beer I'd had yesterday. I liked everything we'd ordered, but Gretchen a little disappointed. She found the brussel sprouts too greasy, the bucatini too salty, and the mofongo so meh that she didn't even want to take the leftovers. (I thought I'd want it later, so we took it anyway.)
To get back to the beach, we took the SunRunner bus. Trying to figure out how it worked was difficult, because the most basic question: "how to pay?" was way down at the bottom of the FAQ on their website. But it turned out all we needed to do was use a credit card with a tap-to-pay feature. The ride was very pleasant, and it dumped us out just across the Corey Causeway on St. Pete Beach, a ten minute walk from our hotel.
Back at the hotel, I checked my email and found something from FamilySearch.com (it's a genealogy website that I think is affiliated with the Mormon church) telling me that I am a direct descendant of one of Benjamin Franklin's first cousins. This was new to me, so I clicked to see how this was the case. What was interesting to me was that the connection to Benjamin Franklin was via Caro Abbott, the mysterious mother of my maternal grandfather, Clarence DeMar. I'd assumed she would always remain a mystery, since I'd never been able to find out much more about her than that she was from Canada. But FamilySearch had her geneaology all the way back to a Peter Folger, an early British settler to Massachussetts who eventually settled on Nantucket island, where, among other things, he worked to convert the Native Americans to Christianity, learning their language(s) in the process. One of his descendants would be Benjamin Franklin, though the line leading to my mother would go on to live on Nantucket for three generations, then move to Maine for a couple generations before giving birth to my great grandmother Caro somewhere in Canada. She would then move to the vicinity of Cincinatti and marry George Washington DeMar. I'd thought that perhaps Caro Abbott, being such a question mark in my lineage, might be the source of my Gujarati ancestor, whom I've figured out was born around 1800. But the genealogy for Caro is no longer much of a mystery, so perhaps my Guajarati (and Coptic) ancestors come from other parts of my family tree.
Somewhere I'd read that after George Washington DeMar died in 1897, leaving Caro and her children in poverty, the local government in Harrison County, Ohio paid for one-way train tickets so that Caro and family could be shipped to Boston, where she supposedly had relatives. The fact that her paternal grandfather (Joshua Abbott, born 1797) was (according to FamilySearch) born in Andover, Massachusetts, supports this story.
At some point, Gretchen noticed the foot of the bed was mysteriously wet. And it wasn't just a little wet. Everything down there was soaked, and there was nothing we had done to cause this. The only theory we could come up with was that there had been a leak from the ceiling. But it was totally dry. We couldn't improvise a good solution to the problem and there was nobody on staff available to help us, so Gretchen called a phone number and eventually a nice older gentleman was sent out with the supplies he needed to make our bed with dry sheets and blankets. Fortunately, the mattress was covered with a waterproof membrane so it was dry under that, and with fresh sheets and blankets, we were good for the night.
Me building foot stools out of sand on the beach this morning. Click to enlarge.
Me walking towards the Gulf of Mexico this morning. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen swimming in the Gulf. (There is also a wading gentleman on the left.) Click to enlarge.
Fancis Picabia's "The Church at Montignym Effect of Sunlight," 1908 at the Museum of Fine Art. I particularly liked this painting, which is more Post-Impressionist than Impressionist. Click to enlarge.
William Charles Palmer, "Sea Shells and Sand," at the Museum of Fine Art. Click to enlarge.
A classically beautiful painting of the sort that Impressionism destroyed at the Museum of Fine Art. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen wore her NY Abortion Access Fund teeshirt today in hopes of getting some acknowledgement in Florida, a state that is actively hostile to reproductive freedom. Most of the people who saw it were stony-faced in response except for the woman working at the front of the Museum of Fine Art, who said she liked it. Click to enlarge.
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