Post 26 St Augustine FL

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St Augustine March 12-18

St Augustine would be our last stop in Florida.  We stayed on Anastacia Island in St Augustine Beach.  We spent our first day taking care of food shopping and laundry.

The first exciting thing we did was take a walk to the beautiful beach!  It was about a mile from the campsite and a nice walk through some neighborhoods.  The beach is one of the most beautiful we've seen.  Plenty of space, a beautiful breeze, white sand, a fishing pier, shops, restaurants, bars and very few people for this time of year.  There was a craft fair happening by the pier so we took stroll through, then walked the beach.  It was Pi day so we just had to celebrate with Key Lime Pie ice cream cones from the May Day Ice Cream Shoppe.










Anne's daughter, Tiffany, came to visit for a few days.  We picked her up at the Jacksonville Airport on Saturday night and brought her back to the campground where she rented one of the campground's cabins right across from our van.

St Augustine is home to the oldest settlement in the country dating back to the 1500's and Ponce de Leon's Fountain of Youth.  It has forts and beautiful Spanish architecture. We took a trolley tour to catch all the sites and walked around the historic downtown shopping district.






Just down the road from the campground was the St Augustine Alligator Farm.  Truth be told, all the ads made it look like a hokey tourist trap.  But we decided to spend the morning there.  We were all pleasantly surprised by the quality of the exhibits, the conservation work they are doing and the amazing natural wild bird rookery.


















Tiffany was anxious to get into the water, so off to the beach we went for the afternoon. The surf was up on the Atlantic Ocean with a red flag warning. Tiffany got wet, but not really on her own terms! Sadly, she lost her sunglasses and and earring when she went under. Tiff rinsed and dried off and then we went to dinner at a vegan place out by the waterfront. Yummy!






We drove Tiffany back to the airport on Tuesday morning, St Patrick's Day.  We spent the afternoon at Hornski's Brewery.  It was a hopping place with a nice crowd and Irish tunes on the record player.  We chatted for a couple of hours with a woman who owns a haunted mansion in upstate NY.  She rents it out on Airbnb.  We're planning to go sometime over the summer!


We left Florida on March 14th, after almost four months, and headed to Albany, Georgia for our first stop on the Civil Rights Trail.

 



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