Jacksonville, day two

Joe left early to attend some meetings and I was left to my own devices. No problem. I'm good at entertaining myself.

After breakfast and the newspapers, I went downstairs to check out and leave my bag with the bell captain. The hotel had a free shuttle service, which we took to the restaurant last night. I took it this morning to the Cummer Art Museum, which I had read about while researching Jacksonville.

The museum is on the property of the original Cummer mansion, owned by lumber barons in the early years of the last century. The Cummers were instrumental in creating the parks and open spaces in Jacksonville and Mrs. Cummer also created an incredible riverside oasis for herself, designed with the help of the biggest names in landscape design--like Olmsted. These formal gardens: English, Italian, and Olmsted are well-preserved and open to the public as part of the museum.

Mrs. Cummer's needlework version of her Italian garden.

It was hard to be in a city with a basketball tourney and not include that in my day. I called a cab and took it out to the Sports Complex, where the activities were located in the Veterans Memorial Arena. I bought a ticket and found myself a great seat for the Alabama vs. LSU game. LSU won by eight points and I was most amazed by the tiger-patterned shoes their head coach was wearing. She was about 6'1" without the heels, but at least 6'5" with them. Men basketball coaches work very hard, but women do the same job AND wear crazy stilt shoes.

Jacksonville, day one

I haven't tagged along on one of Joe's countless business trips since 1990 when he had to spend the week of my 30th birthday in Monterey, California. That was a fantastic trip and I have some lovely memories celebrating my birthday there.

Hard to believe it's been 25 years since that last time, but this week I decided to tag along on his trip to Jacksonville, which is just a three hour drive from Beaufort.

We arrived at our downtown hotel in the afternoon and were quite pleased to have a big room on the 11th floor with a great view of the St. John's River. After settling in we decided to take a walk around the city to see what's what. 

Our impressions of the downtown area were not good. There are several giant office towers--mostly occupied by banks, a few restaurants, a couple of seedy bars and lots of homeless folks. The area had some interesting architecture, many historic buildings, but so many were abandoned or slated for the wrecking ball. We had hoped to find a wine bar, but struck out and after an hour of hiking in the heat, headed back to the Hyatt to see if we could score a cold beverage.

The people watching opportunities in the hotel lobby were great as the SEC womens basketball tourney was in the city this week and we had five of the teams staying in our Hyatt. I've never seen so many gorgeous and TALL women in one place. We found the bar, ordered a snack and a cocktail and enjoyed the river views and amazon women milling about.

I premade a dinner reservation at a restaurant called The Wine Cellar, which turned out to be quite good. They had an entire wall made of wine corks, which inspired me to keep collecting them. One oddity was we could see the outside seating area through the window next to our table. At one point a small raccoon was sitting on top of the outside bar. We could see his mom sitting in the crotch of a tree and another small one hanging around her.  Our waiter Wayne, a true "good-ole boy" told us about his efforts to trap the raccoons and then release them in a nearby park on his way home from work. Sure enough, while we sat there, the Havahart trap sprung and one of the raccoons had been caught. Wayne said it was his fourth one that week. He seemed very proud of himself.