Drove over to St. Petersburg (just St. Pete to the locals) yesterday. Very clean, lots of parks and waterfront, even has the first hotdog carts we've seen in Florida. Huge public pier with aquarium that is partially underwater for fish passing by in real-time. Largest water reclamation plant in the world. Largest Dali museum. First scheduled flights in USA, and first baseball spring training --- both in 1914. Baseball very popular here: the Tampa Bay Rays play indoors in a/c'd Tropicana Field and won World Series in 2008. The "Baseball Walk" has homeplate-shaped sidewalk markers for miles, giving local baseball history (read April Fool's story in one of the photos). All pretty cool.
But the most intriguing claim since 1910 is that it's the Sunshine City of the world. St. Petersburg is listed in the Guiness Record Book as having the longest streak of consecutive days of sunshine. 768 days starting in 1967. OK, climate has changed since then but the record still stands. The local newspaper in 1910 proclaimed it would give away that day's paper free if the sun didn't shine. Over 14 years (1910-1924) it only gave away the paper 500 times. That means the sun didn't shine only about 11% of the days.
It was a great publicity stunt for the city, getting world-wide coverage and bringing the hordes to St. Pete. The paper isn't free anymore, but the sunshine is --- we went topless yesterday.
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