Here’s Marina Jack’s Marina in downtown Sarasota, where it was 80 degrees and sunny today. This picture is taken from a little peninsula park opposite the marina. You can see Nonchalance, stern out, is the 3rd boat from the right side of the picture. There are over 100 boats here and we’re not that big. That’s a 70 ft. sportfish next to the blue glass and white marina building. It’s a really easy walk downtown from here.

Sunsets are right out our aft deck. The picture was this evening’s sunset, and the sun is setting right about where I was standing when I took the picture of the marina above. We can sit out on the aft deck at night with the lights on and no bugs! No sand burrs, no skeeters, nice spot!

We visited the John & Mabel Ringling (of circus fame) estate and museum today. Sarasota was their summer home and they had a spectacular home on 80 acres overlooking the bay, all decorated in early gauche. They traveled extensively and collected art and built a museum on their grounds to display it to the public. This is their deck overlooking the bay. The grounds had a very large rose garden in full bloom and about a dozen huge banyon trees, like those found in Africa, with hundreds of tree size air-roots supporting tree sized branches such that one banyon tree looks like a 1/4 acre jungle all by itself.

This is the art museum sculpture garden, with 8 large display halls all around 3 sides and the bay on the 4th side. The art was mostly 15th through 19th century oil paintings of religious subjects. I only appreciated about 1/10th of it because you get religious subject overload quickly. He also had a small pocket watch collection, which I liked.

The foundation the Ringlings funded to run the art museum also recently built a large museum to house the most incredible circus model ever built. It was just completed in 2004. One man with a lifelong interest in circus models spent 55 years (yes 55 years) building an extremely detailed Ringling Bros. Circus model. The building has it laid out just as a circus would have been in 1927 pulling into a town on their circus train, unloading all the animals, 1500 performers and the equipment, hauling it through the town and setting up many huge tents with a menagerie tent and a 3 ring circus bigtop. It doesn’t sound that interesting until you see the actual models, which are beautifully done and the displays are masterfully laid out. The picture above is a small part of the total town, which is laid out in about ½ an acre of space about 2 ½ ft. off the ground (so kids can see it well). The people in the model are about 4 inches tall, all to scale. The man who built it is now about 80 and still working on it.