Tag: Florida
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Village of the Arts
Village of the Arts in Bradenton, Florida is a fun way to spend a day. Although it is a residential area, many of the houses are also businesses selling all sorts of tchotchkes – everything from crystals and gemstones, to glass, pottery, a quilt fabric shop, jewelry, wind chimes and distinctly 70s-looking tie-dyed clothing. I
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Bearadise Ranch Bear Preserve
The eventual idea for Bearadise Ranch Bear Preserve begins in Trondheim, Norway in 1926 with a young kid named Johnny Welde. With a fascination for bears, he ran away from home and joined the circus, the one place where he knew he could find them. He began to develop an act and eventually made his
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Kayaking at Lido Key
I’d never been kayaking before. I had visions of those movies where someone tries to get into a rowboat or canoe, it starts rocking, they can’t keep their balance, and they end up in the water, drenched. But what the hell. If I fall in, so what? I can swim and I’ll dry off. Even
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Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art
The Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art is located on the Tarpon Springs Campus of St. Petersburg College. You have to wonder why St. Petersburg College isn’t located in St. Petersburg, right? But let’s move on. The Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art has over 7,000 modern and contemporary works from 20th and 21st century art. Now, as you
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Tampa Bay History Center & Columbia Cafe
Tampa Bay History Center is well worth your time. It has three floors of exhibits covering a multitude of topics pertinent to Tampa – the cigar industry, indigenous tribes then and now, the Civil War participation, the Mafia, pirates and privateers and much more. The clever set-up encourages visitors to linger at the displays. Not
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Eureka Springs Conservation Park
You sort of need a compass to find Eureka Springs. I’ve never followed such a convoluted route to get somewhere in my life – twisty, winding, pretzel-like roads, bridges, commercial properties, and backwoods residential areas. You name it; it had it. I wouldn’t exactly call it a scenic drive, but it was darn sure interesting.
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Tampa Trolley
The TECO Line Streetcar System (Tampa Trolley) is a 2.7-mile, air-conditioned, electric streetcar line connecting downtown, the Channel District, and Ybor City. The best part? It’s free. If you want to take in more than one site in the downtown area but don’t want to drive from parking garage to parking garage, or worse, walk
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Yalaha Bootlegging Co. at Blue Bayou Farms & Yalaha German Bakery
For this outing, I chose an out-of-the-way, off-the-beaten-path place called Yalaha Bootlegging Co., a craft distillery of moonshine liquor. Moonshine? I was intrigued. Moonshine sort of conjures images of good ole country boys clad in dirty overalls, sporting long gray beards like tree moss, toting museum-quality rifles, and tramping through tangled backwoods to get to
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Croc Encounters Reptile Park
This small venue is interesting but could use some TLC. The animals are the highlight, but the setting is a bit casual and unappealing. When I made my reservation, the young man who booked it told me not to arrive early because there was nothing to do. Out front was a small dirt parking lot.
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Dali Museum
Warning: Irreverent opinions from an uneducated artist follow. If you love Salvador Dali, you might want to skip this post. In an effort to do something outside my comfort zone, I decided to visit the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg. I expected to hate it, since I’m not a Dali fan but, overall, it was
Lisa Browder 