FL15 - Day 13 - Ringling

The days seem to be going quicker now as we are deep into week two of the trip. The other night we looked in the window of a local estate agents to look at prices. A decent sized villa, three beds, two baths and a pool.... £145000! Our house in Hythe is valued at about £200000 with no pool and adjoined to a neighbours!

Anyway I digress. After breakfast today we decided to go back to Sarasota and visit the Ringling Estate. What used to be the circus wintering grounds now hosts a massive theatre and entertainment center, plus the art gallery that John and Mabel Ringling accumulated, plus their house on Sarasota Bayside.

We lucked it as the art gallery was free today. but the house Ca' d'Zan and the circus museum weren't. We decided the large gardens and art museum for free outweighed the other two at $25 for each of us.

At the visitor centre we met a lady from Surrey working as a volunteer, She has been in Sarasota for eight years and she said they keep a house in England. Lucky her.

The next stop was the Banyan Cafe. Both of us were gasping for a coffee.

That satisfied we set off in 90F temps to look at Mabel's Rose Garden. It was okay but not a patch on Sissinghurst. Maybe the high temps aren't good for roses.

Sadly the camera started playing up again and was refusing to take any pictures. I knew I should have relied on my iPhone rather than Nikon! The [r07] and [r10] "errors" coming up. Googling indicates a bufferng problem. But as I don't take loads of pics in burst mode, it shouldn't happen.

Switching either the camera body or the lens to M(anual) had it working but not with both on A(uto). So many of the pics I took were actually out of focus and blurred!!

The house, Ca' d'Zan is an Italianate design and looks as though it was plucked from Venice or somewhere. The whole ground is tiled in marble and the walls decorated with coloured brick and friezes,

All the pics above have come up a .nef files. They won't display in the normal windows explorer but will in Picasa. I have saved then as jpg in Picasa and they appear!

Selfie with D50

I reset the menu on the D50 in "menu" and it seemed to cure the problem. For now?

A further walk in the baking heat took us to the art gallery via a small lake. In the italianate garden there are many statues, one of David and one of Atlas holding the world on his shoulders, plus many more.