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St. Petersburgh Dog Bar
Sunday, March 2 2025
location: room 107, St. Pete Beach Suites, St. Pete Beach, Pinellas County, Florida
We'd be flying back to Newburgh later today, but first the plan was to hang out in the dog-friendly outdoor part of our hotel with A's sister C, the woman who'd comped us into the Museum of Fine Art yesterday, and her rescue pit bull Ricotta. At 9:30am, C arrived, pushing Ricotta in a stroller designed for twin toddlers. (Ricotta has limited mobility and, like Neville, is resistant to being led anywhere on a leash, so it's easiest to just push him around in a stroller.) C and Ricotta set up with us on some comfy outdoor couches with a modest amount of shade (we would've had better shade had the sun been higher in the sky), and we mostly sat around oohing and ahhing about Ricotta, with me asking various questions. Ricotta weighs about 65 pounds but has never needed knee surgery. He's a failed foster, and of course now C cannot imagine life without him. But he's also a huge pain, peeing randomly on everything (he had to wear a urine-absorbing belt), getting restless and wanting to explore, and then starting to bark for no obvious reason. But he's such an absurdly cute dog that nearly everyone gushes about him, including some guy wearing a grey Trump/Vance 2024 teeshirt who was checking into the hotel. That's not something anyone would do ironically, at least not yet. Gretchen gave the guy the look of death but didn't make a scene because, as she said, C has to live here.
The three of us then took Ricotta for a walk around the block, pushing him sometimes in the stroller or letting him walk extremely slowly, checking everything with his nose. C has to constantly pick Ricotta up to put him in the stroller or on furniture, so she gets a lot of exercise from this. As we went around the block, most people were friendly, including a chatty woman who suggested we wear sunglasses and a cane to walk him on the beach, where he would be seen to be a seeing-eye dog. One Hispanic mother seemed worried by Ricotta and carried her young son away, picking him up by one of his arms. And one weatherbeaten older man said of Ricotta that it looked like he'd been a little too cozy with the food bowl. (To this, I later said we should've told that guy he was being a little too cozy with being "a Man in Florida.")
After C and Ricotta left, Gretchen and I checked out of our apartment and walked to the nearest SunRunner bus stop, which was across Pasadena Avenue from the one we'd gotten off at last night. We then rode the bus to about as close to Good Intentions (the only restaurant we'd eaten at) as we could get. At first we were the only people on the bus, but then it filled so full that a good eight or ten people were forced to stand. Some of those people had brought their bikes aboard and used special mechanisms to raise the bikes up so they stood vertically on their hind wheels.
Near the bus stop where we got off, we went into Tombolo Books, a little independent bookstore that Gretchen's boss at the Woodstock bookstore had recommended we visit. In there, Gretchen chatted with a woman who seemed like the owner about local politics and what it's like to be a leftie in a reactionary state like Florida. Having wanted something printed to read on the flight from Newburgh, I was looking for a promising book to read on the flight back. I settled for a copy of The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs, which seemed aligned with my curiosities.
Next we returned to Good Intentions for our third meal there, this one being brunch. Gretchen ordered the french toast with sides of scrambled egglike material and cheesy grits, whereas I got the avocado toast with a side of fries. Gretchen ordered a virgin bloody mary and I ordered a boozy coffee drink called a Thunderbird. Though the avocado toast was served on a bed of spicy oil, I found it kind of bland and uninteresting. Gretchen was similarly unimpressed with her food, though she put a bunch of it in a container to eat later. For all the meals we'd been eating at Good Intentions, we weren't actually finding much exceptional food there.
Our last destination in St. Petersburg was definitely the highlight of the whole trip: the Dog Bar. It's an outdoor bar covered with astroturf that is also a dog park, very much like something one might find in Portland, Oregon. To minimize incidents, the dogs who visit the Dog Bar are all registered at the entrance, perhaps to eliminate known bad actors. Inside the gates, it's a doggy wonderland, with dogs of all descriptions running around at high speed, playing with each other, jumping up on tables (which is allowed), and frolicking in kiddie pools filled with cubes of ice. Meanwhile their human parents sip beverages, mostly beers. We, of course, hadn't brought any dogs. Usually people without dogs are not allowed in dog parks, bit the Dog Bar didn't care. I soon had a pint of some sort of not-great hazy IPA, which I sipped while giving a backrub to some sort of golden retriever. I interacted with a few other dogs after that, one of whom leapt into my lap and left big wet paw prints on my trousers. I looked around for piles of poop, and there weren't any for a long time. And the two times it appears, it didn't stay long before someone cleaned it up. There a couple staffers who wandered among the dogs to make sure everyone was playing nicely and perhaps to also clean up poop. They carried spray bottles, which they used to mellow the moods of dogs who seemed a little too hyped up. While we were there, Gretchen spent most of her time near a human couple with a pair of dogs who didn't seem all that interested in other dogs, though those other dogs kept showing up to say hello. The turnover at the Dog Bar was much slower than at a conventional dog park, evidently because the humans had more incentive to linger.
Towards the end of our Dog Bar experience, Gretchen ordered us a Lyft, which seemed to be approaching but then started heading to the airport without ever having picked us up. When Gretchen then tried to order another Lyft, she couldn't, because it claimed she was already getting a ride. (One would think that the GPS data available to Lyft would show that Gretchen had never been anywhere near the driver and was not with him on the way to the airport.) So Gretchen revived her Uber app and used that to get a ride from that rideshare network. While waiting for that to arrive, she successfully disputed the previous ride and received a refund.
The young white dude driving us to the airport somehow triggered a conversation about veganism, which he seemed genuinely interested in, and of course Gretchen was happy to fill his head with vegan propaganda, some of which I found a little dubious. The driver asked if we'd heard of Bryan Johnson, the tech bro who is trying to live "forever." "Is he the one who got transfusions of his teenage son's blood?" I asked. "Yeah," said the driver.
Somehow getting through security at the St. Petersburg International Airport went even faster than it had at Newburgh, and before long we were seeing what could be bought at a shop near our gate. I ended up buying a plastic bottle of orange juice into which I could pre-mix my smuggled vodka. We waited until it seemed the very last people were boarding our plane before we joined the line, but even so there were people behind us and the line going into the plane seemed to crawl. Once we were in our seats (stuffed in beside a random middle aged white lady with an aisle seat), the plane spent a lot of time simply waiting on the runaway for its chance to take off. The pilot addressed us a couple times about this, and he said that due to the Grand Prix and perhaps other events, there was an unusually large amount of airplane traffic and the Jacksonville Air Traffic Control center was spreading planes out farther apart to better manage their flights. This suggested to me that perhaps there weren't enough air traffic controllers to handle the amount of traffic, and, if so, it was probably the fault of Elon Musk and his Dunning-Kruger-powered DOGE team mindlessly (and illegally) taking an axe to our government.
When we finally did get in the air, we made good time to Newburgh. For most of the flight, I read from my new book, The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs, though, even forty pages in, I couldn't really see how a corporation compared to an artificial intelligence. When the drink cart came through, I thought $6 was a good deal for a pouch of bloody mary mix, so I bought one, though I drank it virgin after finishing my boozy orange juice.
After we landed in Newburgh and exited the building, the cold air (it was in the teens or twenties Fahrenheit) was bracing. But the walk to our car was short, and it soon heated up to a comfortable temperature. I was sober enough by that point to do the driving, and I drove us home to Hurley.
When we parked on the remains of the slab of ice that had been in the driveway since my birthday, Charlotte came out and howled with delight at our return. She then ran back inside to tell Neville the good news.
I ended up staying up late and drinking by myself to make up for all the drinking by myself I hadn't done while in Florida.
Gretchen with Ricotta this morning. Click to enlarge.
At the Dog Bar this afternoon. Note the kiddie pool full of ice cubes. Click to enlarge.
The line boarding our plane in St. Petersburg. The sky at the time was cloudless. Click to enlarge.
Sunset over North Carolina as seen from our plane. Click to enlarge.
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