From a walk through the lighted Florida Botanical Gardens to finding out the truth behind an old sailor story, Cathy Salustri has taken Clearwater Patch readers to many places near and around Clearwater. Take some time and catch up on some of the most popular places featured in our Destination Clearwater column. After, take a moment and vote in our poll to pick the favorite place featured in 2012. 1. Destination Clearwater: Strolling Through the Garden 2. Destination Clearwater: The Grey House: Part Two 3. Destination Clearwater: Barber Temple Orange 4. Destination Clearwater: The Case of the…

Just outside Clearwater, the Florida Botanical Gardens lights up like a Christmas tree every December. Not just one Christmas tree, though – all of them. It's one of those rare Florida nights when it actually feels like winter feels in most of the country. I’m not complaining; I love that I can wear shorts on Christmas. But when we do get a cold burst, I feel brilliantly alive out in the elements, wrapped in a scarf and breathing the cold air. That’s what I’m doing tonight, and I’m doing it at the Florida Botanical Gardens. There’s no snow, but it’s a Florida wonderland all its own over here…

Every year I am part of something called "NaNoWriMo" in November. November is National Novel Writing Month, hence the catchy title. The goal – and you can visit the Website if you want more information – is to write a 50,000 word novel between Nov. 1 and Nov. 30. There are no prizes and no one else reads the book; it's something I do just for me. Everyone knows, of course, you need coffee to write, so that's why I find myself seeking out a coffee shop. I'm ready to write, and my editor has told me about a nifty little coffee shop by Westshore Pizza on Hercules Avenue and Drew Street. I found …

When I was a kid at JFK Middle (now benignly renamed Clearwater Fundamental Middle School), I rode the bus to and from school most days. Oh, sure, some days I would luck out and my grandmother or grandfather would come get me, but by and large I lugged my purple backpack and super-cool purple barrel-shaped purse (Hey, I was 11 and it was 1983. Give me a break!) to the big yellow bus. The school bus situation being what it was in Pinellas at the time, we left the school and wound our way through Clearwater. What was a 10 minute ride to school in my mom and dad's spiffy green Volkswagen Rabbit …

Read the first part of this two-part Destination Clearwater here. The grey house still sits on the southern point of Clearwater Beach, but now I know more of the story. Actually, I’ve known one of them for over 20 years, as it turns out. Let’s back up, to my 19th year. I attended St. Petersburg Junior College and worked before and after school care for the Suncoast Family YMCA. In the mornings, I watched over our nation’s youth at Plumb Elementary, and one morning we were short staffed and we had a group leader from another before-care site. He told me he lived “on the only house at the south…

From the library to the top of Clearwater Beach and every place in between, twice a month travel writer Cathy Salustri shares her stories of Clearwater. Catch up on some of her recent columns: Destination Clearwater: The View From the Top Destination Clearwater: Alone in Public Destination Clearwater: The Grey House   Check out more Destination Clearwater columns here.

Labor Day. In other parts of the country, people are thinking about autumn, looking for the leaves to change, and getting ready to pull down their winter wardrobe. In Florida, that's not how we do it. Sure, it's Labor Day this weekend, and the kids are back in school, but we'd all be kidding ourselves if we even tried to pretend it was the same thing as autumn up north. Me, I usually get a touch of melancholy, a gray pallor that starts to come and go like a set of clouds drifting past the afternoon sun. It's not so much that summer's ending – because it really isn't, not in Florida – but …

My paddleboard's loaded on the car, and underneath my sundress I'm wearing a daffodil yellow bikini, but I can't seem to make myself get up from my roost on the third floor of the library. The bay is a sheet of smoked glass, cut only by boats and the occasional bird, and I want to get out there, I do. But I'm perched at the edge of the library's reference area, in a soft chair with sturdy wood arms, and the solitude among the stacks fills me with tiny zings of pleasure. Growing up, I volunteered here. Oh, not this library – a much smaller one in the same spot. It had three floors but the …

Oh, how I wanted the stories to be true. I heard it first on a dolphin watch boat. Later, when I spent a week crewing on such a boat, I read the story from the script myself. "Once upon a time, before all those condominiums were here, the southern point of Clearwater Beach was peppered with single family homes..." "Is this true?" I asked the craggy boat captain, a crusty old salt more concerned with making sure he didn't run the speedboat into a set of Jet-Skiing tourists from Ohio. He grunted at me and slowed as a flat-bottomed skiff cut across his bow, the two men lifting their blue and …

It's too hot for much of anything. I want to be outside, really, I do. But it's 97 degrees, and some days, all I want is a cool place to sit down and relax. I start with Capogna's Dugout, my go-to pizza place. It’s not my final destination, but it’s a good place to start my day indoors.I don't usually dine in at Capogna's, opting instead to get a pizza to go so I can throw my feet up and not worry about acting like a grown–up, but today I do. In celebration of the face-of-the-sun heat, I sample the Sam Adams Summer Ale and then devote myself to making short work of a hamburger pizza, …

As a pre-teen we made the drive over the Courtney Campbell Causeway roughly once a month, or so it seemed. We moved to Clearwater from New York and, as anyone who moves to Florida can tell you, we suddenly grew quite popular with extended family. That meant I went to Walt Disney World a lot. It also meant that we took many trips across Tampa Bay.When we did I loved to look for dolphins. This was, of course, before I realized dolphins in Florida waters are as common as cockroaches in a New York tenement, albeit with better PR. That didn't matter to the 8-year-old me, though: it was quite a …

  It’s empty now. The bright purple and teal colors, a screaming advertisement for deserted dreams. For years the building remained, alternately, a desolate cavern of failure and a garish beacon for out-of-towners, filled with thin, made-in-China, cotton T-shirts, all at the bargain price of "3-for-$10." It wasn’t always like that. Before we drew people in with cheap souvenirs, something else pulled them inside the shop. I stop at the darkened windows and peer inside, and the dust and grime clear away, as do the other businesses on the corner. The few remaining T-shirts hanging in the window …

I used to work by the oak tree. I never thought much about it until someone pointed it out to me, even though I walked by it at least 10 times a week. Oak trees are everywhere in Florida. No big deal. Certainly not as cool as cabbage palms tucked into every nook and cranny, or as funky looking as longleaf pines, once almost completely decimated thanks to timber mining. Pollen and spiders drop like crazy out of oak trees. They're Florida's forgotten tree, overlooked because of their commonality. This tree, though... Someone went through a lot of trouble to make sure it had plenty of chances …

I turned 15 in 1987, so I couldn’t drive yet. I spent a lot of time in the front seat of my friend Chad’s maroon Ford-type car, heading to Rocky Horror at Countryside Mall, driving up and down a pre-roundabout Clearwater Beach, and taking trips to the airport to ride the trams back and forth and page each other over the loudspeaker.  Chad’s car actually belonged to his parents, but they let him drive it all the time. As the declared ringleader of our merry band of misfits, he spent hours chauffeuring us on his latest adventures. At the hands of teenagers, this marvel of midwestern engineering…

Perspective means everything. We, as humans, get easily overwhelmed by life’s smallness. Use me as an example: this spring I finished my Master’s degree in Florida Studies. “Finishing” included writing and defending a thesis that stretched to almost 300 pages as well as taking four comprehensive exams on all my coursework, all while continuing to work full time at a host of writing jobs. While completing this opus, I stopped going to the gym. I stopped eating well. I stopped doing anything not directly related to earning money and finishing my degree. I lived in triage, swatting as they came …

As far as crash-and-burn teen legends go, Clearwater is pretty bereft. I grew up here, and I only ever heard one, which quite honestly never scared me. See, there’s this hill — well, for us, it’s a hill; in northern states it’s a paved dirt pile — in the middle of a neighborhood. And on this hill sits a cemetery. When I went to Clearwater High, we called it Cemetery Hill. If you live anywhere near it, you know which one I’m talking about. It’s a few blocks south of the high school on Hercules.Now, what’s neat about this particular cemetery is that, while it looks like just your ordinary …

Used to be, I'd laugh at the Santa in the rowboat every Christmas. With great disdain I'd make snarky comments about the little Santa set adrift on the manmade lake amidst the trailers. Every Christmas he made his appearance on a rowboat in the middle of the retention pond, where he would wait, alone in a red fluffy suit, for his big day. I would laugh, too, at the mobile homes I called tornado magnets. These little trailers — gussied up with plastic deer and bright ceramic gnomes — represented everything I found wrong with the Sunshine State: cheap housing, easily destroyed by weather, …

The lady boarding the trolley wants to know how long the ride takes. The driver doesn’t seem quite sure what she’s asking. The woman tries to clarify by asking how far the trolley travels. Finally, the driver explains that the trolley travels the beach and the trip takes about an hour.The woman seems satisfied with this answer and she and her companion move toward the rear of the trolley. The beach travels past their oversized window as they talk about the trolley. I don’t go out of my way to talk to people. I don’t like to think of myself as a social person, but on some level I must be at …

When I was a kid we would drive to the bluff and watch the fireworks. The bluff, back then, was a verdant expanse of sloping grass. Two statues stood sentinel: The Spirit of the American Navy and The Spirit of the American Doughboy. On July 4th they watched families crowd their tri-fold beach chairs and aluminum-framed redwood chairs side by side and wait for the fireworks. Kids ran through the crowd with sparklers. That was my sole interaction with the bluff, although I drove by it regularly on my way to the beach. When the city of Clearwater started talk of changes downtown and a new bridge…

Drizzly cold days beg for me to pick up a Capogna’s pizza topped with hamburger, uncork a bottle of cabernet, slip into my sweatpants and make the most of my Netflix subscription. In the summer, we get rain on the regular, but it rarely lasts more than a few hours. Today, the weather slowly turned from “mostly sunny” to “barely blustery”, settling finally on “delightfully drizzly.”At least, it would be delightful if I could either embrace the rain, twirling and dancing beneath the drops or climb into my cave and pull the rock in behind me. As it stands, I can do neither. I have my iPad and …