At the end of November, Gary and I flew to Sarasota, Florida to visit with mom and David at their timeshare for a week. We didn't do anything too crazy. Most of the time, we just relaxed and hung out on the beach.
One of the first things we did was visit the estate of John Ringling of The Ringling Brother's Circus. It was actually pretty interesting. We spent the entire day there going through their home, the art museum, the circus museum and the next door college buildings. No, it's not a clown college....they just turned some of the estate buildings into a local college.
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| My mom for scale |
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| The whole estate was decorated for Christmas |
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| I don't know the name of this bird, but apparently it doesn't oil it's feathers. So, when it gets wet it has to air dry it's wings. What a weirdo! |
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| John Ringling, his first wife and his brother were buried here. Not originally though....they were moved here in the 90's I believe. |
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| This is an example of why I think art is BS sometimes. This is a painting in the Ringling art museum. Insert eye roll here. |
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| This art was actually really cool. The artist created all the Chinese Zodiac animals out of Legos. The artist is Ai Weiwei and his piece is simply Zodiac (2018) Lego. |
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| There was a man who made it his life's work to create a scaled replica of a circus. It was huge and there's still people working on creating pieces for the display! |
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| Don't text and drive - even if you are in a clown car |
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| We walked a lot on the beach. Just enjoying the super white sand and looking for shells. |
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| Some guy caught a little shark fishing. He let us touch it before he threw it back in the water. |
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| I saw this when I was out running one morning. |
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| On Thanksgiving day, we ran a local 5k. It was actually pretty fun. They had us run over the John Ringling Causeway bridge and then back. I did pretty good for me. I ran an 8:03 minute mile and finished in 25min. I was hoping to place in my age group, but I didn't. |
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| At the finish line! This race was probably the most supported 5k I have ever participated in. It was the ALSO Turkey Trot. They practically had a buffet at the finish line. Fruit, muffins, coffee, water, beer, oatmeal. It was amazing! |
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| Our finisher medals |
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| Last sunset before heading back to Michigan! |
Here's to lots of fun things planned for 2020!
