We are wrapping up our current little sunshine state series with everyone’s favorite Florida fauna, the manatee. In the midst of writing that sentence and trying to remember that “the sunshine state” was Florida’s nickname, I have found out that the legislature has gone to great lengths to gerrymander the state symbols and delineate as many animal constituencies as possible. So although manatees are Florida’s state marine mammal, on that same page you’ll note the dolphin still makes the list as the state saltwater mammal (which in my opinion does not address manatee migration habits), the alligator is titled the state reptile, leaving therefore room in turn for the panther to represent the entire Linnean kingdom as state animal and thus rounding out every animal that anyone is aware lives in Florida. I will note for the sake of my dairy cow-raising father-in-law that we get down to meat of things with the Cracker Cattle being the Florida state cattle, rounded up presumably by cowboys on the state horse, the Florida Cracker horse. Every state is stupid and ridiculous.

But back to why we’re here, manatees. The state is dotted with manatee viewing areas and over the course of our travels we visited two of them on different days. I am not educating any readers here but manatees, like any reasonable living creature, prefer warm water and will therefore concentrate on cold days where the water is warm, specifically the cooling outlets of power plants. The first of these we visited was Tampa Electric’s Manatee Viewing Center next to their Big Bend Power Station.

I had first learned of this viewing area via Atlas Obscura, and I thought it would be kinda hokey. Like not really a destination, but some picnic tables where the locals were aware you could see manatees. We were very surprised therefore when we arrived and turned into the large parking lot dotted with solar panels leading the way to a massive visitor’s center. It is a whole destination. You could spend the afternoon. We only really touched on a part of it because it was so late in the day when we arrived, that we couldn’t possibly have gotten down to the big viewing tower or anything before the trails closed.

But we arrived and proceeded directly to the manatees. And there were tons! It will be an unfair comparison to our next manatee park, because on the day we visited the TECO MVC it had been cold (for Florida) for the few days prior in addition to being a bit nippy right then. So the manatees were huddled for our viewing pleasure right in the little discharge canal. They mostly floated there. It was a lot like watching hippos, in that most of what you see is small patches of the backs of manatees, though every once in a while you see a snort or them swimming around. Manatees fight less than hippos do though. Still, magical to see the majestic manatee in its natural(ish) habitat.

And the visitor center is very nice too. We didn’t poke around the exhibits much, but they had a café and a gift shop. The whole place is set up by the power company to make people feel better about living next to a coal-fired power plant (when I bought a lapel pin in the gift shop the credit card charge was to Tampa Electric), but it’s pretty effective. It seems a great place to take kids, and also very significantly they had an unbranded Mold-a-Rama, which I went gaga for. I love a Mold-a-Rama, and I am now the proud owner of a plastic manatee.

Our next manatee viewing experience some time later was down at the Fort Myers Manatee Park! This again was a nice little way to spend some time in an afternoon. This park is downstream (as seems obvious in hindsight now that I’ve looked it up) of the Fort Myers Power Plant. This one, from my quick Googling, is natural gas- and fuel oil-fired. The biggest thing about this park for us is that it had been warmer when we visited, so there were not so many manatees. They were taking advantage of the nicer weather to go forage in less crowded pastures. But there were a few, and also some big fish and then also some kayakers, one of whom we got to watch capsize. I can’t tell if that was due to the fish, the manatees, or a personalized imbalance.

The rest of the park here too is a nature park with some short nature trails, and we got to check those out more thoroughly in this location because we had more time. It is always beautiful to be in nature. This location too had a gift shop (though without lapel pins that said something akin to “Fort Myers Manatee Park”) but which supported the local government instead of the local power company. There was no visitor center per se except a few signs about manatees. All in all a nice little local park, with the added bonus of seeing some manatees, and pondering the modern power infrastructure that makes the world work.

This post continues of course my current little disjointed Florida series, but it also continues a survey of Tampa-adjacent art museums – I have previously covered on this blog visiting both the Dalí Museum and the Imagine Museum. Both those museums are actually in St. Petersburg, but we won’t split hairs. On this day we were in fact in Tampa visiting the Tampa Museum of Art to give us something intellectual to do on a sunny Florida day in late November.

The most significant part of the experience of going to the Tampa Museum of Art was the fact that we (my super amazing wife and I) went with my mom. As a youth, I do not recall my family going to art museums a whole bunch. This is not my mom’s fault, it is the fault of kids having such a heavy choice in the selection of museums, by which I mean my brother always wanted to go to the Natural History Museum but if I had a say in the matter we would be going over to the Air & Space Museum. I think if dad got to pick we went over to the American History Museum, and mom’s influence was generally being in favor of any museum that would keep either the kids or dad from getting too rowdy. All of which to say that although it’s not like we haven’t taken mom to art museums before (see my first two links), it is always fun!

And the Tampa Museum of Art has quite an eclectic collection. Thinking back, the eclecticness is probably my major recollection. The museum’s website has that habit of particular museums that I am disappointed by, i.e. they have only a tiny portion of their collection viewable online, so it will be hard to show you some of this, as a heads up. The bulk of the museum is up on the second floor, and exiting the elevator we were deposited in a small section of I think recently acquired contemporary works. The first ones I took photos of were by Ya La’Ford and Paul Devoti. The piece my mom particularly liked, which I cannot find online because I did not take the right photos, was a large photographic artwork titled I think “Tod’s Liquors.” This was a I think you would call it a surrealist piece, a photo of the eponymous store but with out front a whole bunch of people designed to exude character. It would be seedy if it weren’t so sunny and my mom liked it a bunch. Maybe that says something about her psyche. This is a swerve for her because while that was up there in her favorites list, her actual favorite was a much less surprising pick by Emile Gruppe titled “Winter Stream.”

I mean look at that thing, that is much more a mom piece of art. This piece was in the second part of the museum we wandered through in our rectangular journey (the museum is mostly on the one floor, and you go around the perimeter), a long gallery of various impressionists and closely related artists. I feel like I am about to say I didn’t know the earth went around the sun here, but I’m not sure I was aware there were particularly any American impressionists. But there were and they were pretty good. As you walked down the gallery the impressionism came into focus with a number of artworks more in the Hudson School vein. The bits I liked the most though were the most Florida bits, which were paintings of the swamp. There were some really great ones! I feel like capturing say a sunset over a river valley nestled amongst mountains is a difficult skill but a widespread one as you got all these American artists roving the West learning from each other on how to paint that, but how many artists were honing the ability to evoke the particular choking depth of a cypress grove? It seems to me it takes a real light brush for that stuff but some of the artists on display had mastered it.

Like all conscientious American art museums are doing these days, the museum was also taking a focus on art by Black artists. “Untitled (Marshland with Palm)” above is by Highwayman Alfred Hair, but also they had a small if stunning display of Vodou flags by Haitian artist Myrlande Constant. These were really remarkable. We have a Haitian friend whose house is filled with beautiful art, but these flags were an artform we were entirely unfamiliar with. They are so intricate, using beadwork to form scenes inspired by religious stories.

But I mentioned eclecticness. After all that Very American stuff, then the museum has the real pride of its collection, a whole bunch of mostly Etruscan artifacts. You really gotta change up your perspective as you go from one gallery to the next. Mom wasn’t too interested. The focus on the antiquities comes from an early donor, one Joseph Veach Noble. There is apparently exactly one photo of this guy, and it is fierce. But what to say about these artifacts? They were neat. The Etruscans are mysterious enough that every little glimpse into their lives is a portal into a strange and unknown world. Like a little model of a liver used for divination, that is something I would never do, use a liver to divine the future. And then of course there is also the mundane but beautiful, like a 2300-year-old fish plate with bright colors and fetching wave pattern on the side and a very useful built-in central indentation probably used for holding fish sauce. I would use that today and as always it is so amazing to see the same brushwork that they would have seen as they sat down to an evening meal.

And so yeah that was the museum. A nice place with a lot of cool art and changing exhibitions. It is strongest when focusing on art centered on Florida itself, reaching into the swampy mists to discover a side of the United States not typically part of the American canon. But artifacts are cool too!

Fresh from our Danube adventure, the next few of posts will comprise something of a Florida series, amalgamating a couple different trips. During one summer when I stayed with my grandparents down in Florida, I read off of their shelf A Land Remembered by Patrick D. Smith. It remains the source of most of my impressions of the origins of Florida, and to this day I expect there to be a lot more cattle around then I typically wind up seeing when I’m down there. All of which is to say don’t worry, these posts won’t be nearly so long and will also involve a lot more marine life.

On one of our trips on down to Florida we were especially excited to visit Mote SEA. Longtime readers of the blog will recall that my super amazing wife and I (only my super amazing girlfriend at the time of writing the post I’m about to link, oh how times change) are big fans of Mote. I have many fond memories of going as a Youth, and my super amazing wife loves both sharks and Eugenie Clark.

Mote SEA is their new aquarium as of October 2025. We had initially tried to go in November 2025 only to find out all the tickets had sold out well in advance. It is very popular! We finally did manage to go on a subsequent trip a couple months later, but only because this time we had bought our tickets well in advance; it had again sold out the day we visited.

Whereas the previous aquarium, Mote Marine, had been jutting out into Sarasota Bay, perched on one end of Lido Key, the new Mote SEA is well inland (if you don’t count the retention ponds) and behind a mall. Frankly I’m about to come down a bit harshly on the aquarium. And for that I’m sorry. I understand entirely the purpose of the new location. Mote SEA stands for Science Education Aquarium, and the place I think is designed around school field trips to get kids interested in science and marine life and conservation. Which is a very, very noble goal that I support wholeheartedly, but having visited Mote Marine so many times, it just lacks the same charm. At Mote Marine you felt more like you were visiting what it was, which was a marine animal rescue center with an aquarium tacked on. At Mote SEA it seems so much more like just an aquarium. And they didn’t even bring over Molly the Mollusk, though again apparently for good reason, that being she is just too fragile to move. I read online that they are going to re-open Mote Marine to the public in some capacity, but maybe that is just an optimistic rumor.

But enough of that, let’s talk about the good bits. The place is very nicely done! You enter and, if you were hungry like we were, you can duck directly into the café they have on-site. My super amazing wife had a fish sandwich, which I will never tire of pointing out is a bit morbid in an aquarium. Then you take a three-story escalator right to the tippy-top to start looking around. The aquarium of course retains its focus on the sealife of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. Up on the top floor in an outside area they have both manatees and the ever-cute otters, so they were both as always entertaining to watch.

As you wander down you get to more fishy-fish, with many tanks of fish. And also penguins! Penguins don’t feature much in Florida generally, but here we happened across a feeding so we got to watch them slurp up some fish. I also liked to watch roundabout here the jellyfish setup they had, which seemed to me to be basically a fish washing machine. I liked to think they had gotten a little bit dirty and needed a freshening up.

And then of course there was the absolute best bit of the aquarium, which was the shark tank. It is a big tank and if you are descending from the top of the aquarium you first encounter it from above, looking down through the surface at all of the sharks. This is cool and they have going along with it an exhibit on Eugenie Clark, which is great. But then eventually all the way down you get to the tunnel underneath the shark tank, and if the shark tank is the best part of the aquarium, the tunnel is the best part of the shark tank and worth the visit. You get to see the sharks gliding around above and beside you and that alone is worth the visit to the aquarium. Just hang out there for a while watching all the sharks and rays glide past, it is great.

Having gone through the whole aquarium, we realized it hadn’t actually taken that much time, so we went on through again, this time appreciating the tops of the sharks even more now that we had seen the bottom, and getting to see the manatees in a different spot of their tank and munching on different pieces of cabbage. Eventually we exited through the gift shop where we both had been tempted by many things but ultimately resisted. All in all if you’re around you should check out Mote SEA. Now that Mote Marine is closed it has the advantage of being no longer knowable and therefore perfect in my memory, but Mote SEA is very good at what it is trying to do, which is show you that Eugenie Clark was cool because she liked sharks.

Reading this week:

• The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi

The title of my last post was “It ends in Regensburg,” which referred to the cruise but not this series of Eurotrip posts, don’t you worry! The thing about Regensburg is that it doesn’t have an international airport, so getting home again was going to require getting to Munich first. To accomplish that, we left the ship pretty early on our final day of the cruise. It’s exactly like a hotel, in that they want you off sometime in the morning so they can prep the cabins for the next round of guests. We had a lovely breakfast and the ship had arranged taxis for us to the airport. My super amazing wife and I head out alongside most of the rest of my family, with our immediate destination as the train station. And from there we caught a train and were on our way!

A brief pause to evaluate whether I would go on a Viking cruise again. I think most definitely someday. My parents paid for this trip as part of the 40^th wedding anniversary, but a quick look at their website reveals this same trip costs about $2700 per person (plus airfare). That does seem worth it. The customer service on the cruise was top notch, with staff remembering your name and preferences and working hard to make sure you have a pleasant time. The food is good and the tours they arrange are indeed pretty interesting and well-run. A Viking cruise suffers only in the same way any cruise does, in that the time is a bit whirlwind, but it was a lot of fun. However, I don’t think we’re going to sign up for another one soon. They do seem to cater to a slightly older crowd who is willing to give themselves over to the steady hand of Viking; mom had wanted to go on a cruise instead of just a generic European vacation specifically so she didn’t have to do any of the planning. My super amazing wife and I are still young and foolish enough to plan overly elaborate vacations on our own, but I could easily see at some point becoming a Viking aficionado. Those world cruises don’t seem like too bad of a deal, really.

But in the meantime and until I save up for that, we were off to Munich. We arrived fairly smoothly at one of the Munich airport hotels, dropped off our stuff, and head on into the city. To get there we took the S-Bahn, which also went smoothly but took a little bit longer than expected. All our trains this day were a bit delayed, which goes very much against stereotypes. Emerging from the train we walked around the Marienplatz admiring everything. On our way back we happened upon a performance of the Rathaus-Glockenspiel which was fortunate timing. Off the Marienplatz we poked a little ways into the Viktualienmarkt (open-air market) and checked out a shop or two, and then got a Munich-appropriate Taiwanese lunch.

This all brought us to our major destination in the city: the Museum Fünf Kontinente! This is an ethnographic museum, and I found it because I was searching for Africa museums in Germany. The website is unassuming, so I didn’t know what to expect, but upon arrival the building is very assuming. It is yet another undeservedly under-trafficked museum. It had a lot of cool stuff.

Upon arrival we got the “combo” ticket so we could also see the special exhibits. Before getting to those we started off at the Islamic art which was, per usual, gorgeous. Many if not most things had English labels in addition to the German, which was convenient for us. From Islamic art we then went into the exhibit on Oceania which was likewise filled with gorgeous and mesmerizing pieces. One thing I wish I understood better about all the collections was the how or why of it. I suppose it is an ethnographic museum so they filled it with ethnographic stuff, but like, there are some Benin bronzes in there with little reflection of how they were there.

One section did have an explanation, which was an exhibit on Myanmar. It came with a disclaimer that it was curated in 2014 when the prospects for Myanmar are different than they are now. The items in the exhibit came largely from a collecting trip circle 1910 when the museum sent a dude out there to buy a bunch of stuff, which is a dream job if there ever was one. This was followed by an exhibit on Japan celebrating 160 years of German-Japanese relations featuring art by a guy that was on the Perry expedition. The art was apparently from his second, non-Perry visit, whatever that means for its perspective.

I of course liked the sub-Saharan Africa stuff the best. One of the special exhibits we had gotten the combo ticket for was “Merci Maman” all about the Malian art of painting on busses. It included some interesting thoughts on the culture, like the bus boys (conductors) being the “heroes” of the operation, which is not how I experienced it in Zambia. They made some hay of how artists will put both Putin and an American flag on a bus without seeing a contradiction. Based on her experience however my super amazing wife didn’t see a contradiction at all, she figured people just know both groups give the country money.

In the non-special-exhibit bit of Africa, one thing they did was mix in contemporary art with the more ancient stuff, which is an interesting comment on both. Some pieces from the DRC included masks and costumes made of Kinshasa trash which is an interesting take. Another claim to fame for the Museum Fünf Kontinente for American visitors is that it houses one of the Yoruba veranda posts carved by Olowe of Ise that inspired the design of the National Museum of African American History & Culture.

At this point after a long day we were beginning to lose steam so we kinda zoomed through the North America section. It was interesting to see North America through a German lens. They kinda mashed a lot of stuff together, or more accurately stuff from a particular culture would be spread throughout, despite a sign explaining that “Indians are not all the same!” The final room we perused was full of Peruvian artifacts, including a few textiles that were 2000 years old, which always blows my mind. It really brings you so close to the past.

Full of the treasure of five continents we made our way back to the hotel via the scenic route through some more shops. And then after a night at the hotel it was off to the airport proper to catch our flight and head on back home, our Eurotrip at its final final end.