Day 16: November 19, 2020 Circus, Circus Comment via blog Check Granny's letters of the day

A cafe that sounded promising was just a short distance from my sleeping spot so I walked there for breakfast. Sunnyside Cafe identifies its sausage as "homemade" and it was quite good.

I returned to the motel and checked out then walked the other direction to the Ringling Museum complex.

First up in the Tibbals Learning Center is an informational film on the circus in the next room and a display about a role circus women played in the women's suffrage movement.

Then it's Howard Tibbals' incredible creation, The Howard Brothers Circus. It's basically a 1/16 scale version of the complete 1936 Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus although there are exceptions regarding the year.

The second floor contains a timeline of the American Circus that starts with a 1793 performance that George Washington attended and runs through Cirque du Soleil. A couple of windows provide overhead views of the Howard Brothers operation below.

The original circus museum building is just beyond. There are quite a few pieces of circus history displayed there, but the main attractions seems to be the Ringlings' personal train car. Visitors cannot actually enter that car but a platform beside it allows peering in through the windows.

The last piece I visited was the Museum of Art. An addition houses some modern but the original galleries hold mostly classic paintings with a religious bent. Many are huge.

Sarasota was as far south as Granddad and Granny reached in 1920, but friends live just a bit beyond. They are actually much closer to Sarasota than I realized and when I contacted them, they were brave enough to give me the address and kind enough to take me out to dinner and give me a place to sleep. Here's a picture of Rose and Brian I took using that new soft focus technique.

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