florida by train, st pete by foot
tommyMiami Herald reporter Margie Lambert was sent on a mission to see Florida without a car. Her plan was to visit three cities she had never visited, taking the train between cities and doing all sightseeing on foot, by boat, bus, trolley and, when absolutely necessary, by taxi.
Beginning in Ft. Lauderdale, her first destination was St. Pete. And she knew it wouldn’t be easy:
The first leg of this trip is the most difficult. Amtrak’s Silver Star will only get me as far as Tampa. Amtrak’s connecting Trailways bus service to St. Pete will get me out of town when I move on to Jacksonville, but won’t help on this leg — it departs before my train gets to Tampa.
I’ll arrive on a Sunday. The local bus traversing the 25 miles between the two cities runs only on weekdays. A one-way cab ride runs about $60 — more than the cost of gas to drive from Miami! Finally a check of the Greyhound website lands me a ticket on a bus that will drop me just a mile from my hotel.
The Silver Star left Fort Lauderdale at 9:30am on a Sunday morning, and arrived in Tampa in the afternoon.
In Tampa, I walk four blocks to the Greyhound station, then kill two hours reading.
It’s 5:30 p.m. when the bus drops me off in St. Petersburg and I walk the last mile to [the Ponce de Leon] hotel, pulling my rollaboard past closed shops along Central Avenue.
I grab a jacket and leave, eager to get to the Columbia restaurant to watch the sunset. The walk is just under a mile. The red downtown trolley — The Looper — turns onto The Pier ahead of me.
She missed the sunset.
It has taken the entire day to get to St. Petersburg and as daylight turns to dusk over the tangle of sailboat masts at the city marina, I know that my complicated route — by train, bus and on foot — is going to cost me some sightseeing.
By the time I get to the Columbia restaurant, four floors up at the end of The Pier, I have missed the view of the sun setting over the city’s skyline.
The Looper makes it easy to get around St. Pete. When it’s running.
The next morning, I walk two blocks to The Looper stop, which I plan to ride to the Salvador Dali Museum, a mile south of my hotel. But the trolley never comes. Later, I find out it was canceled because it was Martin Luther King Day and a parade was scheduled that would crisscross the trolley route. So I walk the mile.
By mid-afternoon, when I have to catch the train, I’ve seen the Dali museum, which does the best job of any art museum I’ve seen of deconstructing and explaining an artist’s work; have been brought to tears by exhibits at the Florida Holocaust Museum; had a lunch of caprese salad and fried oysters at the Central Avenue Oyster Bar; and walked about 2 ½ miles.
I pick up my luggage at the Ponce, then catch (1) a cab for the $20 ride to the Amtrak bus station on the St. Petersburg-Clearwater border; (2) a bus that takes me back across the bay to the Tampa train station; and (3) the train.
Reminds me of our trip to Orlando, but at least she planned it out before she left. Read the rest of Margie’s No Car Florida Adventure at the Miami Herald.
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