We had to bid farewell to our lovely Rainbow River House this morning. None of us really wanted to leave because it was such a wonderful place. We didn’t want to leave the river. We hope that some day we’ll return for a longer stay.
We set off for St. Petersburg. Another birthday wish Reva had was to visit the Chihuly Collection. Christine and I have been big fans of Chihuly for a long time. One year when we visited Dad and Shirley in Siesta Key, we learned of a Chihuly exhibition at the Fairchild Gardens and we drove over to Coconut Grove to see the exhibition. It was fantastic and very memorable. The Morean Art Center in St. Pete recently built a new building to house its Chihuly Collection. We visited it this morning.
Dale Chihuly is a fantastic glass artist. His work has spanned decades. Many of his glass pieces are quite distinctive and when you see one you know it is Chihuly. His massive suspended glass pieces are incredible.
He also does these huge flowers. There was one piece in orange of several huge plate-like flowers that was really lovely.
We had seen a Chihuly ceiling at the Bellagio in Las Vegas that was out of this world. There was another ceiling exhibit here is St. Pete.
The biggest piece in the collection is a huge oblong installation containing most of Chihuly’s most common pieces. It was wild with color and various shapes. It was pretty impossible to photograph the entire piece, so here are many of the various parts.
Here are two close ups of some of the intricacies on some of glass in Chihuly’s large bowels.
I loved this very basic white and black piece.
And here is the classic Chihuly boatload of colorful balls.
This is a Chihuly collection worth seeing. I think we all enjoyed it a great deal. Since it didn’t take as long as we expected to go through the collection, we decided to also take in the Salvador Dali Museum just a mile away from the Chihuly. We walked to the Dali Museum which took us through the Art Center in St. Pete, which is a charming collection of shops, galleries and eateries.
Upon arrival to the Dali Museum, we bought lunch in the café there and sat outside. It is cooler today than it has been with quite a brisk breeze. But there was bright sunshine so when in the sun, we didn’t feel too cold.
At the Dali, we had double treat because there was also a Frida Kahlo exhibition. We toured that first. The exhibition focused a lot on the very tragic life she lived. There were many photographs of her and her cohorts, including husband Diego, and several of her drawings and paintings. The exhibition focused a lot on how the pain and suffering in her life came through in her work. It was an interesting exhibition, but also very poignant and quite sad in terms of Kahlo’s tragic life.
We then walked through the Dali exhibit. He certainly was quite a character and his work got more and more unusual over his lifetime.
I didn’t know anything about Dali before seeing this exhibition and I can’t say I know a great deal more. However, I do know that his work is quite mind bending. Surrealism is pretty interesting and also quite weird.
After our museum tours, we headed off to the Hilton Carillon. After a couple of screw ups in directions, we found the hotel. After resting a bit, we then walked around half of the lake that is a nature preserve around the hotel. It’s a nice boardwalk of about 3/4 of a mile in length. There are birds and water fowl and other things in the lake. We didn’t see a lot, but it was a nice walk in the late afternoon sun.
We opted on going out someplace for dinner. We picked an Indian restaurant, but I didn’t want to get back on the highway as we headed out so we turned around and went to a very nice little Mediterranean café across the street from the hotel and had a yummy dinner.
We’re now settling in for the night. Tomorrow we end our time with Reva and Jo and go our separate ways. That will be bittersweet. We’ve been having a good time with them, but we’ll go our separate ways to enjoy more vacation.
I have also stayed at the Hilton Carillon and loved the boardwalk around the pond – we saw lots of turtles and birds there. Loved seeing the Chihuly glass!