February 3

    After sorting out this diary [apologise for you not seeing this yet, but we have found places to stay where we can't go online so far, so unable to send this or check E-mail etc]

    We headed for St. Petersburg  to spend the day. We went to the pier first and ate lunch watching squirrels stealing food from O.P.'s leftovers.

    We noticed a pelican, so decided to see if there were more, found a colony of them across the car park and watched for a while, they are so graceful skimming across the water! We walked further up and found a place where you can feed them, sat to watch  American's feed them fish and scream loudly when the pelicans tried to get the fish they were warily holding at them. A lovely  heron was looking on hoping for a fish - to no avail.

    Found the  inverted pyramid which we had seen in our book, it comprises of shops, which we wandered around, an aquarium, which we didn't, as we went to one yesterday, and a really good viewing area on top with a cafe Cha Cha Coconut, where we drank pink lemonade and watched little brown birds steal sachets of sugar, open them and eat the contents! This kept us highly amused for a while.

    We then caught a shocking pink trolley bus which took us on a guided tour of St. Pete showing us gems like " The Comfort Station" a loo that some builder who was into Catholic Churches, built as a mini replica of a church in Italy when the Bishop wouldn't pay him for building the original. Also the First Union Bank which suffered recently when an 18 year old girl failed to get cash from a hole in the wall machine, lost her temper and drove her car through the window in retaliation. Unfortunately she had dropped her purse, so she resides in gaol for her ram raid at present !!

    We got off at the Dali Museum [no funny comments from you, or we'll send you the Dali postcards] He painted some weird stuff, didn't he !!!! But I really like some of his paintings.

    We came back to our chalet then, took a glass of wine with us to the beach to watch the sunset, then walked to Guppy,s for a gourmet seafood meal of scallops, swordfish, mahi, and salmon, washed down with beer for Andrew and wine [Silver Ridge, Sonoma] for me, an excellent end to an excellent day.

    We have a thunder storm forecast for tonight - what happened to sunny California when we got here???? Well Andrew is snoring as usual, so I will sign off for tonight, we move on again in the morning, so hopefully we will be online tomorrow and can transmit from there, Love to all our friends who read this, goodnight and sweet dreams Laura & Andrew xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.