Crazy Happy Lifestyle: Day 10 - Travel to St. Pete and the Dali Museum

Thursday, June 15, 2023
Posted from: St Petersburg / Madeira Beach KOA, St Petersburg, FL
Miles driven: 142
Total trip miles: 2156

We have a nice short two hour travel day to St. Pete today. But before we get to the nice part of the day, let’s talk about the not so nice part.

Just after 1:00am the wind kicked up very suddenly in one burst and shook the camper. Matt jumped out of bed to put in the awning. Our rule from day one with the camper is to never leave the awning out at night. Weeeeellllll…..anyway…

He had just got outside and grabbed the swim towels off the awning bar, when a giant gust of wind picked half the awning up, twisted it, and deposited half of it on the roof of the camper. This caused a very loud crash in the camper. Here were the four reactions from the people in the camper:

Mom: If the strap slips out of your hand when you are putting the awning in, it will SLAM up against the camper and make an awful noise. That’s what I thought it was. (I will get teased for the next few days about how calm I was at this moment.)
Grace: “Caleb, a tree just fell on the camper.”
Cameron: He shot out of bed too fast and stumbled to our room and almost passed out asking what happened. I calmly told him Dad was putting the awning in.
Caleb: He thought part of someone else’s camper hit ours.

Matt then pounds on the side of the camper telling us to get out there and help. Cameron and Grace run out. I am still sick and in no condition to run and do anything.

The next 3 minutes go like this:

Matt jumps on top of the camper to try to get the awning down because the wind is whipping the awning around and there were two campers in the line of fire if the wind carried the awning and metal poles away.

Long story short, he had to use a box cutter to cut the awning off of the camper. Then get the metal poles off the camper. And finally he had to figure out a way to get himself off the camper. It’s a long way down to jump, but he was a lightening rod up there.

Cameron did not like any of Matt’s ideas of how to get down, so he got our 6 foot ladder out of the back of the truck (it is a tiny travel ladder that folds into a 4x4 pole that my parents gave us). He set it up at the back of the camper so Matt could dangle off the camper and try to get his footing to climb down. Somehow this worked and Matt was safely on the ground.

This was what the radar looked like. You can only see the edge in this picture because the blue dot is covering it, but the spot over us is tiny but black. Black is bad at any size.

In the aftermath, everyone ended up in our room to recover (Caleb is under the blue and green blanket in the bottom corner of the picture). The adrenaline was pretty real and we were trying to figure out if we were safe to stay put or needed to find shelter.

Thankfully, the we had made it through the worst so we talked a bit and eventually went back to bed…though I think it took us all awhile to get back to sleep.

The next morning, we went up to the campground office to ask if they had suggestions to help us get rid of the broken pieces of our awning. In the camping community, we have found that neighbors help neighbors and campgrounds are very helpful when bad luck strikes. Usually…

Not only did they not offer any suggestions, they sternly told us we could not leave anything here, we couldn’t use any of their tools, and they would charge our credit card if there was anything left behind….which was exactly what we were trying not to do. But they would not help in any way and wouldn’t even give us a referral to someone who could help. Perhaps that is why an affordable decent campground within 15-25 miles of the major parks in Orlando was basically empty. Should have been a clue.

Part of the awning. :(

Thankfully, there was an RV repair guy there working on another camper with damage. Matt went over and asked if he could use his sawzall to cut up the awning pieces so we could get them in the back of our truck until we could find a place to get rid of them. He said sure, but that he would also like to have the scrap metal. Perfect!

Matt and the kids cut up the awning metal, loaded it into his truck, returned the tool with some cash as a thank you, folded up the awning tarp, and loaded it in the back of the truck.

On our way out we were going to throw the nicely folded awning in their dumpster, but they made it clear that would be a $150 fine if we did…so down the road with our awning we went!!

We only had two hours to drive today, but this was the line up of beverages ready to go to the truck before we left…three of them are Matt’s. I’m not sure two hours is feasible at this point.

Hello downtown Tampa. Believe it or not, we made it the full two hours without stopping!

We arrived at the campground early in the afternoon. We had time to rest and swim before heading out on our evening adventures.

My coworker, Eric, suggested the Dali Museum, so we decided to head that direction. They have half price entry, a DJ, and lots going on every Thursday night after 5:00. Excellent!

On the way, a little bit of confusion ensued. Dali is pronounced the same as Dolly. As in Dolly Parton. As in a few members of our party thought we were going to a Dolly Parton museum. Which would have also been cool, but alas, we were referring to Salvador Dali, who is perhaps most famous for his surreal paintings of melting clocks.

Reasons for going to this museum vary. You may enjoy his art. The museum is right on the water. The building itself is reason enough to go. This place was amazing to look at and walk around.

And now for some of Salvador Dali’s art. He may be known for his surrealist art, but this guy did a little bit of everything! All paintings below were his.

Monet anyone?

Picasso perhaps??

The museum had eight of his masterworks. These were giant paintings with so much going on that they implemented augmented reality (AR) into their museum app. There paintings were so complex and layered that until you looked at it through AR you missed entire components of the painting. And once you see them, you can’t un-see them and you wonder how you ever missed it. Very cool. Grace is using the AR in this picture.