Color blooming in downtown Safety Harbor in late September.
It was a quiet morning during the week at the gazebo. This is usually a busy spot on the weekends with events going on here.
Murals off Main Street.
This guy is a regular visitor to the park in front of the pier. HIs owner was busy looking at his phone instead of enjoying the morning out (I know, I’d be doing the same thing).
Brett and I went out on a Sunday in early April to get lunch to go and decided to drive around St. Pete and check out all of the murals. They are spread out so it’s not easy to walk around and see them all. We picked a perfect time since there was almost no one in the area and most of the buildings didn’t have cars parked in front of the murals. Any other time and they would be have been half hidden by trucks and SUVs. We didn’t realize how many of them there was. So many colors.
We found out towards the end of our visit that Chinatown was really close to our hotel. A 15 minute walk. So our last night there we headed over early to walk around and then have dinner.
Some of the murals. Everything was bright and colorful.
We also found the theater district on our walk back to the hotel.
Atlanta, as seen in the first episode of the tv series “Walking Dead”. Except in the scene, the roads were lined with abandoned cars that were photo-shopped into the scene. I took this the first night of our long weekend to visit friends. It was dark and cloudy and had just stopped drizzling. My husband thought I was going to look silly being the only person standing on the Jackson Street bridge taking this picture. No, there were several other people there taking pictures as well. I found out later that there are “Walking Dead” tours that take you to some of the places that scenes were filmed at. This is one of the stops.
Another Atlanta downtown scene, taken as we were leaving to head back home.
One morning while Brett was riding his bike with some friends, I took a walk around Piedmont Park. They used to have great art festivals and other events here. I’m sure they still do but it was quiet the morning I walked around the lake.
A few of the critters and an interesting mushroom or fungi around the lake. After my walk around the park, I headed over to the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, more on that later.
We stopped at a shopping center to get something and this hawk was in the parking deck. At first I thought he was hurt but I think he had just finished a meal. He took off as I got closer to him but he let me get pretty close. He left behind a few scraps of his lunch.
Almost 25 years ago, Brett and I got married here in the gardens behind the Swan House. We were passing by and I made Brett stop for a few minutes.
I was feeling really nostalgic for Atlanta. I had lived here for 17 years before Brett and I moved to Tampa for work. Since his family moved to the Tampa bay area years ago, we hadn’t really spent any time here in over 3 years so we came back for a long weekend in August. We packed a lot of sight-seeing in the 2 and a half days we were here. We happened to be staying in a hotel next to this mural. The mural is on the side of the building where the old Limelight disco was back in the 70’s and 80’s. I spend many weekends there dancing with my sister and our friends back in the mid 80’s.
These are all murals at Wynwood Walls in Miami. They are only a fraction of the murals that are painted on the building in this old warehouse district. Back in 2009 someone had the idea to turn an old deserted part of town into the cool place to hang out. The old buildings are now all painted and the area has an eclectic mix of stores and restaurants. On a recent trip to south Florida to visit Brett’s relatives, we spent a morning walking around looking at all of the buildings. I brought my wide-angle lens so that I could stand on the sidewalk and get the entire wall in. It was early enough that were wasn’t a lot of people there to get in my pictures. I took a ton of pictures. Every corner we turned we were like “Oh, look at that cool wall” so more to follow.
