Days 21-22 (May 23-24): Petrograd, Florida

Granted, I only spent 36 hours there and stuck to the down town core, but I liked St-Pete. I do suspect it may be a large suburb as I did a bit of walking downtown on the 24th and did not run into a lot of people.

The highlight of my visit was, of course, a bar. (Were you expecting anything else?). I managed to stumble across The Ale and the Witch (oh, let's say 2nd Avenue at 2nd Street) within about 20 minutes of walking around downtown (with no assistance from TGABT this time...). They have 32 taps of American craft beer, which they rotate extensively; as soon as a keg is empty, it is replaced by another beer. Over the two nights I wa there, there must have been at least a 25 per cent turnover. Evidently, they go through 65 to 70 kegs per week, so they re-draw their draft board roughly twice in a week. (They deal with eight distributors, which is, I am guessing, probably significant in them getting so many flavours.)

While I was there, they had a number of local brews on tap, from St-Pete's Brewery and Cigar City Brewery from Tampa. I had two of Cigar City's IPAs: the Homefront, the production of which involves chips from Louisville Slugger maple bats, which was subtly hoppy and the Jai Alai, which I preferred, as it is hoppier, but not overwhelmingly so (and better on tap than in cans).

The bar also feature live music, nightly it seems, on a patio they seem to share with other restaurants.

The staff is more than efficient and dedicated and can provide advice on their various draft offerings (which is an art, with the part of the clientèle who is looking for PBR or Miller Lite).

What else? Oh yeah, the keep stats on their draft board of how many kegs they have served year-by-year since they opened (1331 for this year, as of Friday night) and of the number of live shows they have hosted. How can you not totally geek out to that?

While the bar is still young and does not have the history and lived-in-ness as most of my favourites, The Ale and the Witch is definitely joining my Top Seven Bar list (forthcoming).

Random observations:

- Yes, it was named after the Russian city.

- I visited the Dali Museum, which is housed in a funky, category-5-hurricane-proof building. Yes, there is a large collection of Dali works in St-Pete, which covers most of the stages of his career; let's just go with it.

- On the train ride from Miami to Tampa, near Winter Haven, I saw orange groves! And huge orange groves: orange trees as far as my eye could see. So, I have seen orange groves and retirees; I think the Florida leg of my trip went well.

- The Miami-Tampa train ride is basically a Grapefruit League express: West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Lakeland, Winter Haven and possibly others I missed.

- For those of you who do not get the title, well, your knowledge of early XX th century Russian history is sorely lacking.

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