Road Trip: South - Capitals Tour
Day 2: Thursday, May 18, 2017 - Tallahassee, FL
Weather: 91 and mostly sunny.
Steps: 11,284 (Steve); 10,400 (Linda)
Drove: 308 miles
After a nice continental breakfast, our first stop in the city was the Florida State Capitol.
We parked in an underground garage. After emerging from the garage, we entered a park. There was an interesting
fountain outside the underground parking garage, in a small park amongst office buildings, near the Florida capitol building.
At the end of the park, walking toward the captiol, is a sculpture with a plaque that reads "We are proud to donate
this sculpture to the people and city of Tallahassee as we celebrate 100 years of continuous publishing. This sculpture,
created by local artist W. Stanley Proctor, suggests the importance of literacy in building a strong community and support
democracy. Tallahassee Democrat. Dedicated April 5, 2015."
As we approached the rear enterence to the capitol, we spied an interesting sculpture.
Linda noticed a bird on one of the fins... (could have gotten closer with the zoom lens, but didn't think it was worth it.)
A selfie. Or is it selfies?
And the view from the stop of the stairs.
We were told to make our way to the twenty-second floor to the observation level. The views were great. Each of
the four directions.
North (the brown building with the curved platform in the foreground just to the left is City Hall:
East (the flag on the right just before the T shaped white building to the
right is the Florida Vietnam Veteran's Memorial and the white building to
the left with all the pillars is the Leon County court house):
South (the red buildings in the background on the right are part of the Florida State University complex):
West (the white building in the foreground that you can't see the front of is the Florida Suprene Court, behind
it is the R.A. Gray Building which houses the Museum of Florida Histroy):
And in the center enclosed area on the 21st floor was some artwork. All of these
were by Joseph Saddleworth, a high school student:
And this is a multipanel work by another high school student whose name we did not get:
This is from Jonah Kasper, Runaway Lake, whose name, the painting, is inspired from the movie
Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
There was much more.
On the second floor of the capitol was the gallary for the Senate, with a close-up of the speaker's area.
On the other side was the house.
In between the two chambers is an opening to the first floor.
Around the sides of the opening are some facts about Florida.
And on the floor below the opening is the state seal.
On the first floor was a chapel.
The chapel wall was made of crushed shells.
After the tour, and before the stop at the gift shop, we stopped to talk to the woman at the information
desk. We got quite a bit of information but one piece that really surprised us was when the woman asked
if we got our book stamped. We asked "What book?" We were then told that a book, called
a Passport, can be purchased wherein people can get stamps at each state capitol that includes the date, city
name, a picture of the capitol and the state flower and or bird. We did not have said book and neither
the information desk nor the gift shop had any for sale. But to demonstrate the stamp, the woman stamped
a piece of paper and gave it to us nonetheless. So we now had our first capital stamp. And we also
now had a mission to get the stamps at the capitols that we would be visiting. Here is Tallahassee's.
Here are the book pages:
And we did eventually get to the gift shop, of course.
There was one building that we saw from the capital that we found out was the state museum.
Though we were not expecting to visit the museum, we were going to go to the old capitol instead,
we decided to. Just outside the museum there was a sculpture group called Movin' On.
It included, front to back, a Miccosukee family of 3 circa 1930s, a Seminole family of 4 circa 1830,
and a King, Queen and servant of the European Contact Era circa mid 16th century.
There were some intersting displays, some with a focus on the Civil War (aka The Northern Agression). Here is a mammoth skeleton.
A small train layout.
An original Star Wars movie poster.
A collection of orange crates with seller's advertising.
The museum, as mentioned above, had civil war memorabilia, some cars, some war veteran memorabilia and some posters from
movies that were filmed in Florida (the SW one above was in a different section of the museum). These few were taken
by Linda due to some meaning or other, including Gulliver's Travels (Fleischer Studios', which in its heyday rivaled Disney
as an animation powerhouse, first full length feature done in Florida).
Nothing too much significantly worthy of photos...
After the museum tour, we walked to the post office a few blocks away to mail our first capital's postcards.
On the way back we passed through a plaza between office buildings that had a couple fountains.
We headed to Jim & Milt's Barbeque for lunch. It was pretty good.
The service was prompt and the prices were reasonable. Linda had the pork sandwich on barbeque bread. I had the
pork sandwich with Brunwick stew and grilled corn on the cob (essentially steamed corn on the cob that is put on a grill for
a few minutes to carmelize some of the corn). The pork was smokey and tasty and their homemade sauce helped make it
special. The pork was sliced rather than pulled which was a little different too.
After lunch our destination was the Mission San Luis. It
is the oldest Catholic mission in the U.S. Here is some information about it.
The doors were rather interesting.
Before heading outside we reviewed the displays of the ancient artifacts. There were some bones
dug up from the site. And these Madonna icons.
Some trees on the grounds.
The recreated buildings were interesting. This building, the council house, was very large and held up to two
thousand. Based on the poeple on the outside, you can get a sense of how massive it is for a wooden, essentially
hand erected structure (wish I thought to get a picture of the inside - but there were a couple classes in there,
it was noisy, and focus was on getting out...).
This is the church.
And this is the fort.
Inside the fort, there was an areas upstairs be we were not permitted to go up there. Here are the
captains quaters, the table set for dinner (door to captain's quaters in the back right), and a work area
(the large wooden pieces on the bench are the sides of a cannon mount):
This is a sample sleeping area for a resident and the dining area in the next room.
This is an outdoor workshop, outdoor kitchen and a hand made chicken coop with live chickens.
In the friary (sorry, no external pic), this is a monk's work area and the kitchen in a separate building (to prevent burning down the friary).
We were a little ahead of schedule as we were done by about 3:30 ET at the Mission. For dinner, we decided to go to our pre-selected location to take dinner with us to eat on the way, so we headed to the Maple Street Biscuit Company. The door wasn't locked, there was no closed sign and we walked right in. No one was at the counter but there was someone in sight in the back. It was after asking if we could get help that we found it they closed, for some reason, at 2:00 local time. We wound up not eating in Florida for dinner at all.
While planning our travel to Mobile, we determined that, for some reason, my original plan was off by 100 miles (I can
only imagine that when I entered the mileage value in the spreadsheet I was using, I hit the 3 instead of the 2) - so
we saved nearly two hours of driving. We pretty much just hopped on Route 10 out of Tallahassee all the way to
Mobile. We hit a couple showers along the way too, but because we had a fairly bigger lunch and we crossed into
the Central time zone (losing [or saving, depending on your perspective] another hour), we were able to go all the way
to our Mobile destination - another Baymont Inn and Suites - before we needed dinner. A couple shots, along he way,
just outside the city. We were on a very long bridge. A very very long bridge - it was a little over eight
miles long. In the first image, note the bridge running parallel to the one we were on, that'll give you some
perspective. In the second, your humble author is driving in the foreground with the Mobile Bay, which eventually
opens into the Gulf, in the background. The last is the USS Alabama (we had considered going here but due to
scheduling and our plans to go to the USS Kidd in Baton Rouge, we didn't).
After checking in at the hotel (which was on the outskirts of the city), I asked the hotel clerk about a place to eat and
he recommended going back into the city for some seafood. After having driven a couple hundred miles, the thought of
another nearly hour round trip for dinner was not that appealing. We decided that since it was so early, we could get
some wine with our dinner too. We took a chance with a local establishmment right down the road "on the main
strip" called The Boiling Pot. Linda had the crawfish
po' boy wrap with a side of slaw and I had the small (yes small) fried crawfish with a side of jambalaya and a side of gumbo.
The prices were very reasonable and the portions were sizeable.
We returned to our room with our dinner and wine. We dined, watched some TV and went to sleep.
FUN FACT: The Mission San Luis is the only National Historic landmark in Tallahassee.