It is a glorious day and with the sun shining and the sky without a cloud we headed off downtown to the Ringling Circus Museum and Arts Centre which is located on the seashore in Sarasota.This Famous Circus organisation run by the Ringling Family which toured the USA in the early 1900's decided to make their winter home in Sarasota and purchased a very large plot of land where they built an amazing house mostly clad and surrounded by marble. Since those days the Ringling Family with their wealth have also became great benefactors to the people of Sarasota and they donated large amounts of money and time to assisting this area. There is now a college and also a large Arts Centre which occupies several hundred acres of space with amazing gardens with hundreds of statues and a large rose garden with a large gazebo in the centre. There is also a Circus Museum with many photos and clothing from their heyday circus day's and also a pantheon surrounded by statues to almost equal Rome. There is also a statue of David.
Anyway we spent several hours wandering around the gardens taking photos then sat for about 30 minutes on the veranda of the house overlooking Sarasota Bay, with the sun shining we could almost have gone off to sleep there. There is also an extensive gallery with some very famous name painters but quite frankly neither Jen nor I really enjoy looking at old masterpieces.
The garden has some truly amazing Banyan trees which spread and spread and are really impressive with their roots hanging down from perhaps twenty to thirty feet high with notices saying please don't touch. There is also a small cafe, also strangely called the Banyan Cafe, I cannot understand why, where we had a quick hot dog and Pepsi. There is also a very nice restaurant called the Treviso which overlooks the lake and gardens but this was a little more expensive than the hot dog and more than we wanted to pay.
We then headed back down University Parkway to the Target Superstore where Noel actually bought a pair of shorts, as he had failed to pack some before leaving UK, and also a new pair of lightweight trousers. They are trousers for golfers really and are very light and supposed to breath well, we shall see but after one day he still cannot play golf. Oh well let's see how the tennis shorts work. We also purchased two large mugs for our tea during travels as most hotels have small plastic cups which are totally unsuitable for the first cup of tea of the day.
We then went to Sarasota Crossing for some food shopping only to arrive a moment after two cars got rather entangled whilst entering the shopping mall. Oh I do wonder how you can do this so much damage to cars when travelling so slowly. Tonight we had fresh salmon on a bed of white rice and it was most acceptable. We then followed this with two sessions of 'Spooks' which was good to watch. After this we watched the adverts on TV for a while before retiring.
On Wednesday, the 27th Jan, it's the Obama State of the Nation speech which we are looking forward to so watch this Blog tomorrow for our deep insight and review of his performance
