Happy days
FLORIDA
St. Pete-Clearwater is all about beaches, or is it? Aaron Millar spends a few happy days discovering celebrity dolphins, quaint ‘Scottish’ towns and wildly good food too
T here’s a moment when you know the holiday has begun. After all the airports, and car hire, and faff and fuss, there’s a point at which you realise there’s nothing left to do but have fun. For me, that moment happened the first time I dug my toes into the pure white sand of Clearwater Beach. It was sunset. The horizon was glowing fire orange, fading to shades of turquoise and deep blue above. My son, Cameron, 16, was juggling a football; my 12-year-old daughter, Elise, was doing cartwheels and jumping waves as they rolled onto the shore. “You’ve got good energy!” I we stepped on the sand. “How could I not,” she replied. “I’m on the beach with my family.” If that one moment watching the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico, digging our toes into the sand, was all we got, it would have been worth the trip. But we hadn’t even started. Clearwater Beach, where we were staying, is part of the broader St. Pete-Clearwater region. If you look on a map, there’s a tiny, crooked finger of a peninsula about 30-miles from Tampa, across Tampa Bay. The town of Clearwater sits on the northwestern part of that finger, right on the knuckle, and St. Petersburg (St. Pete to locals) is on the southern tip. shouted. Her happiness was infectious, like the wind and sea had lifted her the moment
The entire region is renowned for its beaches. Circling that finger are roughly thirty-five miles of pure white sand lapped by emerald green waters. The region has won numerous awards over the years and is considered to have some of the best beaches in the country. That’s good news for families. As we all know when it comes to entertaining kids, sea and sandcastles do most of the work. But while St. Pete-Clearwater has that in abundance, there’s enough else, as we were about to discover, to warrant a much longer stay. It’s also, at just a couple hours’ drive away, a great
place to mix with an Orlando theme park break. Wave to the mouse, say hi to Harry Potter, then cross from the east coast to the west, and swap endless queues for endless sunsets.
“OUR TRIP BEGAN WITH OUR TOES IN THE SAND ”
You’ll also get around 200 bottlenose dolphins thrown in for good measure, most of them living year-round in the nearby marina and bay. We took a boat tour and saw dozens in a feeding frenzy, jumping out of the water and diving down again like a wave. If you’re lucky, one or two might even surf the wake of your boat as you head back home. It was exhilarating, but those guys were just ordinary cetaceans. In the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, just a stone’s throw from the beach, they have dolphin celebrities. 20 years ago, in 2005, a baby dolphin named Winter was spotted by a fisherman caught in a
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