St. Petersburg is known as the Sunshine City! With an average of 360 days of sunshine in the year, it's a pretty well earned reputation and today was no exception. After getting organised, today we headed our for a drive in our massive Lincoln towards Tampa to visit International Plaza. After a few challenging one way streets (that were not noted in our directions thanks Google!), I finally managed to get on the interstate - these 6 line highways are just amazing! 20 minutes later we arrived - my first American driving experience was a success.
The International Plaza was just like traditional American malls - huge! There is even a Tiffany's inside the mall! We spent a few hours wandering around the centre and picking up some essentials from The Sharper Image and Sephora. Then we headed back to St. Petersburg. I missed a turnoff when driving, and we ended up taking an exit that required us to pay a toll... this is when we encountered our first "real" American moment.
Classic American Moment #1: After pulling up behind another car to pay the 25c toll (it is all automatic, there was no one manning the toll both), we realised they seemed to be having trouble finding some change.... next thing we see is the guy getting out his credit card to pay the 25c toll!! Even funnier than this is that after 3 swipes and a few different cards he still couldn't pay the toll! So, we got out and gave the 25c as they were now causing a bit of a road block. Only in America.
After getting back on the right road and making it safely back to St. Petersburg we made a stop off at the grocery store.
Classic American Moment #2: In the same complex as the supermarket was a bottle shop. While we were paying for the groceries Dad walked across to it to pick up a bottle of wine for dinner. After loading the groceries into the car, we drove over to pick Dad up as it was close to the exit. Another car pulled up to park next to me, and I then realised that this guy had seriously driven 2 rows of car spaces over instead of walking to go to the bottle shop!
After a good day out we had some dinner and made plans to head to Orlando later in the week.
1 comment:
I love the Lincoln, are they much harder to drive been so big? They certainly seem to be the Holden of USA. Looks like you adapted well to driving in the states!!! Well done! I am so jealous with your Ben and Jerries, smuggle some back for me in a cool pack :)
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