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I more than made up for lost time today, and got a little bit of museum going in as a bonus. The morning ride was a wide highway through woods and swampy areas, with occasional slowdowns as I passed through small towns. On either side of St. Petersburg, it was mostly stripmalls, though just south of St. Petersburg there's a long causeway with a stopover on an island that gives lots of pretty views.
The museum was the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg. I have mixed feelings about the museum. There are some really impressive works there, particularly the ones from later in Dalí's life, huge oil paintings with lots of super-realistic detail and lots of visual effects: glows, halftones, interference patterns, reflections, shimmers, and things that read differently at different distances. One features a sequence of Venus de Milo figures that from the right perspective becomes a toreador. Another is a pixelated portrait of Abraham Lincoln that up close is a woman looking out of a window.
The frustrating thing is that the lighting in the gallery reflects off of the oil painting's surface, and there are a bunch of views of each picture that you can't see because of the light. I also think it would have been nice to be able to get higher perspectives on some of the paintings. The larger ones (13 feet tall!) have details at the top that are hard to see, particularly with the glare.
Still well worth the visit.
I'm spending the night in Port Charlotte, which puts me a bit closer to Key Largo than I'd planned.
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