Alberto is a tropical storm. He organized himself over night and has had sustained wind speeds of 70 mph or so. I believe that it is quite likely that he will be promoted to a Hurricane before he makes landfall tomorrow.

I won’t go so far as to say that this is ruining my vacation, but gusting winds and driving rain is not what I had in mind when we planned this trip.

Usually when we go on vacation we do something low-key and inexpensive. We go camping or we go to my parents second house on the lake. And we have fun. This year we decided to do something a little more exciting. To take a real vacation. I guess I don’t have to spell this out, this is what chose to do. And we have invested much more in to this trip than we usually do.

I can’t help but be furious about this storm. I hate not knowing if the kids will even have a chance to go swimming in the Gulf or if we will be able to go to some of the cool places I really wanted to take everyone to, most of these place are going to be difficult to manage in rain and gusting winds.

Having said all that, I’m not about to just give up. We searched for some indoor things to do. And we wanted to find things that were unique to here, not just cop out and go to a movie that we could see at home. I found a few places and we checked two of them out today.

First we headed over to the Clearwater Aquarium. To call it an aquarium is probably over stating the place. Which is why I chose it. One of (if not) the best aquariums in the country is in Baltimore, so I guess I get a little snobby about going and paying to go in an inferior one some place else. This place was more of a marine animal rescue. I like animal rescues. They do good work, and I don’t mind paying a little money to get into a place that does that kind of work.
I also like that the people that work at these places care passionately about what they do. They had a few dolphins there. Also some sea turtles, sting rays, otters and some other assorted fishes. The kids got to ‘pet’ the sting rays, and we got to see the dolphins get fed and trained by the volunteers. We able to get very close and learn a lot about the animals. And of course, I took a boatload of pictures.

In the afternoon, we drove down to St. Petersburg and checked out the Dali Museum. I was impressed with it. It was a very large collection. And the tour guide was awesome. I am familiar with Dali, or at least I thought I was. I learned a lot. It was great.

And now, I’ll just have to play the wait and see game for tomorrow.