St. Petersburg, Florida

The World Traveller Series ~ Episode 16

Written by Brett Hayhoe

For someone born and raised in Cairns — a city that considers thirty degrees a mild morning — warm climates are not an obvious drawcard. The heat is familiar, yes, but familiarity does not always translate to preference. Given the choice, cooler destinations tend to win.

St. Petersburg, Florida, was never going to be about the weather. It was going to be about InterPride — and InterPride, wherever it lands, has a reliable way of making a destination considerably more interesting than it might otherwise appear on the itinerary.

St Petes, as it is affectionately known to those who live there and those who return, did not disappoint. What it lacked as a personal climate preference it more than compensated for in warmth of a different kind entirely.

Arrival — Tampa Bay Bridge and the City Beyond

The flight lands in Tampa, and from Tampa the route to St. Petersburg crosses water — a rather large expanse of it, via a rather spectacular bridge.

The Sunshine Skyway Bridge is one of those pieces of infrastructure that earns the right to be called a landmark in its own right. It rises high above Tampa Bay in a long, elegant arc — cable-stayed, pale against the sky, with the water stretching away in every direction and the far shore promising a city that, from this approach, appears to float. It is a picturesque introduction by anyone’s measure, and an unexpectedly stirring one for a traveller who had not known what to expect.

The city that awaits on the other side delivers on the arrival’s promise. St. Petersburg sits on a peninsula between Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, sun-soaked and low-slung, with a waterfront that invites lingering and a pace that suggests the locals have long since decided that urgency is overrated.

The Conference and the Gay Village

The InterPride conference proceeded with the purposeful efficiency that these gatherings have established as their signature — days of productive sessions, the particular energy of a room full of people who have travelled from every corner of the world to work on something they believe in, and evenings that allow the work to give way to something more enjoyable.

St. Petersburg’s gay village — alive, welcoming, and doing very well for itself — provided the setting for those evenings. Several venues were visited across the course of the conference. All of them were enjoyed. The village has the quality that the best of these neighbourhoods share: it is not performing for visitors, it is simply going about its life, and visitors are welcome to join in.

The Beach — and the Latvian Delegate

The beach was not, in all honesty, high on the agenda. Cairns produces a particular relationship with beaches — one of casual familiarity that stops well short of enthusiasm. They are there. They can be visited. They are not, as a general rule, the destination.

One evening, however, the hotel’s beach chairs presented themselves as a reasonable option. The warmth, the sound of the water, the relative stillness after a full day of conference — all of it conspired to make lying down on one of those chairs feel like an entirely sensible decision.

It was in this position — horizontal, unhurried, doing nothing in particular — that a colleague and friend from Latvia decided to come over and say hello.

What began as a greeting between conference delegates concluded with rather more of the Latvian delegate being seen and experienced than had previously been the case with anyone else attending the conference. An international incident, by the most generous definition of the term. The outcome and ending were, it must be said, entirely pleasurable.

The beach, on reflection, has its appeal.

The Drive — American Flags and American Pride

One afternoon, with the day’s conference sessions concluded, local friends based in St. Petersburg offered a driving tour of the surrounding area. The offer was accepted without hesitation.

The socioeconomic character of the region sits comfortably above the middle — evident in the width of the streets, which are generous almost to the point of extravagance, and in the scale of the homes, which make no apology for their considerable dimensions. It is a prosperous part of a prosperous state, and it wears that prosperity openly.

What struck more than the architecture, however, was something simpler: the flags.

The American flag was present in almost every front yard, without exception. Flying from poles, mounted beside doors, displayed in windows. Not as statement or protest — simply as expression. A daily, unremarkable declaration of belonging that required no occasion or argument to justify itself.

America attracts criticism on many fronts and for many reasons, some of them entirely warranted. But this particular quality — the uncomplicated, unself-conscious national pride of its citizens, their ease with and affection for their own flag — is something genuinely admirable, and something that does not translate readily to the Australian context.

There is no equivalent in Australian front yards. The national pride is real enough, but it is expressed differently, more quietly, more ironically. The American version, in all its straightforwardness, is something else. A friend commented, well after this trip, that more states of the United States had been visited than most Americans ever manage. The observation is probably accurate. It was also noted, in the same breath, that the south deserved more time than it received.

Houston — A Night That Wasn’t Planned

The only other southern state in the itinerary arrived unannounced and by necessity rather than design.

En route from Long Beach to New York City, the weather in New York had other ideas. The flight was delayed — grounded by inclement conditions — and the airline, to its credit, provided a hotel for the night. The hotel was in Houston, Texas.

Houston in a single unplanned overnight is not a visit in any meaningful sense. It is a bed, a meal, an airport in the morning, and a set of impressions formed too quickly to be entirely reliable. What can be said with confidence is that Texas, glimpsed briefly from a hotel room and the window of a shuttle bus, has a scale to it that announces itself even in passing. Everything, as advertised, is bigger.

The flight to New York departed the following morning. Houston remained, and remains, an item on the list of places that deserve a proper visit at some point. The south has more to offer than one delayed night’s worth of impressions. It always will.

Conclusion

St. Petersburg, Florida will not be remembered as a favourite climate. The warmth is not unwelcome, but it is not the draw. What it will be remembered for is the quality of the conference, the life of the gay village, the unexpected pleasures of a beach chair encounter with a Latvian delegate, and the quiet patriotism of residential streets lined with flags on an ordinary afternoon.

It is, in the end, a city that rewards the open traveller — the one who arrives without fixed expectations and allows the place to make its own case. St Petes made its case well. The verdict was a favourable one.

The World Traveller Series is written and produced by Brett Hayhoe — publisher, editor and administrator of Q Magazine.

Read more at Q Magazine Blogs — Ask Brett Podcasts — Ask Brett and YouTube

Next: Washington DC and Arlington Cemetery.