The Ringling - Greatest Show We Didn't Plan
Plan on spending at least 2 days here.
We hadn't planned any of this. Eileen and I were sitting around in our hotel in Clearwater when my sister & brother-in-law mentioned, that Sarasota was worth a detour — not a quick one either, at least warrants two nights, because "there's so much to do there." No itinerary, We just went on the spur of the moment.
Turns out my brother-in-law undersold Sarasota. Siesta Key, right nearby, was just voted the #1 beach in the entire US for 2026 by US News and World Report. We didn't even get to it — that's how much else there was.
We started at The Ringling with the Circus Museum, and I want to be careful with this next sentence because it sounds like exaggeration and isn't: inside is the world's largest circus model. Not "one of the largest." The largest, full stop. After a short video on circus history, we walked into multiple rooms holding something like 50,000 individual pieces, each one built with a level of detail that stops you mid-step. You don't tour it so much as stand there slowly realizing how long someone's life must have been dedicated to making it.
Parade would march into town with over a thousand people!
Next door, a second museum held the actual circus props and artifacts, including a life-size train coach that John Ringling once lived in. The literature says it could be reproduced today for about $320,000 in 2021 dollars. Eileen and I stood in it and just laughed — the woodwork, the fittings, the sheer density of craftsmanship in that coach, we're talking a couple of million dollars if you tried to build it now. Nobody's quoting 2021 prices for that kind of joinery anymore.
Then it started raining, which meant the gardens — apparently extensive — were off the table for us this trip. But my sister-in-law had already bought the extra tickets for Ca' d'Zan, John and Mable Ringling's palatial home, so we went from circus wagons to marble floors without much of a transition at all.
From there it was a 10-15 minute walk to the Museum of Art — 21 galleries, contemporary work, an Asian art collection, even a glass exhibit. I didn't include photos of the amazing glass exhibits because the Colors and hues were so rich that photos could not do justice. At that point we'd stopped being surprised that there was more.
Here's the thing about a trip you fall into instead of plan: you leave knowing you barely scratched it. We didn't get to the gardens. We didn't get to Siesta Key. We're already talking about the two nights in Sarasota we're going to owe ourselves next time — and it's all because of one offhand comment in a hotel room in Clearwater.
Sometimes the best plans are the spontaneous ones.