Renewal Leave - Part Eleven - Tour of Tampa Day

I also had a Tampa day last week. I started out on Wallace Circle (off Manhattan and Gandy) visiting our hold house there. It used to have a car port where the window and chairs are but it looks so nice now. 

Then I popped over to the Catholic church off Manhattan where I attended preschool, St. Patrick's Catholic Church. 

From there I drove up Bayshore Boulevard and over to University of Tampa. There's a wonderful bookstore/restaurant/coffee bar across from campus called the Oxford Exchange that I wanted to check out. You could get lost in here for hours. 

Then it was time to visit the Henry B Plant Museum in the old Tampa Bay Hotel, now part of the University of Tampa. The museum is in the part of the first floor. This is the hotel that Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders stayed at before they deployed to Cuba. And then I wandered through the gardens outside a bit. 

I finished up the day at Channelside downtown at the Tampa Bay History Center along the Riverwalk. This is a fabulous history of our area spread over three floors. It included a lot of history about the Seminole Indian tribes and also the cigar industry history in Ybor City. I took the stairs and came across the original sign from the old Maas Brothers store in downtown Tampa. 

On the top floor there was an observation deck where you had views of Harbour Island and the Port.