I had about a dozen things I wanted to blog about while we were in Tampa, but where did the time go?? My quiet, peaceful, boring poolside vacation turned quite busy. I walked all over the freaking town looking for a cool retail location, convinced there had to be one. The closest I found was a Publix Supermarket. Where I bought hamburger buns that I had to carry on the plane to get home.
I walked so much Monday and Tuesday that I could barely walk Wednesday when we had to get on a plane. Brilliant.
But aside from that, here's the view from our hotel room:
The hotel was quite nice, if you ignored the carpet and the fact that housekeeping absolutely would NOT leave more than 2 washcloths (and 47 towels). It was hot. I took a lot of showers.
Now for the real highlights.
Monday night we ate dinner at a place called Bern's Steakhouse. I dare you to go look at their menu. This was an awesome 4 hour dining experience. The French Onion Soup! The salad with macadamia vanilla bean dressing! The steak... Yum. And that's just a sample of dinner. Then came the tour of the kitchen (amazing) and the wine (a huge, yet small sampling, of their total wine collection, which is the largest in the world at over 100,000 bottles). Then the dessert room, which requires separate reservations! I can't even tell you how awesome that meal was.
During the wine portion of the tour we saw several "last one in existence" bottles of wine, as well as a $30,000 bottle (I will never remember what he said it was) that our tour guide said would hopefully be served in the Stanley Cup trophy if the Tampa Bay Lightning won the Cup. They're in the playoffs, you know. And it just happened that they were playing game 3 against the Washington Capitols the next night...
That's the St. Peete Times Forum, where the Lightning play. I'll save the rest of that story for another post, because there are more pictures!
And finally, on Tuesday Greg and I spent much of the morning at the Florida Aquarium. It was pretty darn neat. Here are a few samples of the creatures we met.
And then on Wednesday we came home. Thankfully I had a good window seat on the first flight out so I could get the traditional "Head in the Clouds" shot.
It was a great trip. We ate some fantastic food (the salsa... I still miss the salsa!) had some serious fun, and I now have another sports team to follow! Let's Go Bolts!
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