Jan 2008

Yes! I finally have a good internet connection, two actually (modem and wifi both work here)! I will also edit this entry again, since I have video's to add.

We originally planned to stay one day in St. Augustine. So far we spent Sunday and Monday here and I still had one more thing I really wanted to see. I thought we could visit the Old Spanish Quarter Monday afternoon, but then Mom really wanted to visit the Old Florida Museum. So we visited that Monday afternoon and stayed over to visit the Old Spanish Quarter Tuesday morning. The trolley company allowed us to park at their station right in the heart of historic St Augustine. I hadn't been thrilled with forking over the bucks for the trolley tickets, but can't say enough about how nice those folks have been. In the end, we certainly did get our money's worth as well.

I didn't really know what the Old Spanish Quarter was, but it sounded interesting. At first I thought it was just the heart of the Shopping area in historic St. Augustine. This is St. George Street, which is where I started my quest:

BTW - Mom was pretty tired from all the sightseeing Sunday and Monday, so elected to stay in the RV. She did get out a little later for the Drugstore however. In the meantime, I did bring her some goodies back for lunch (hot chocolate and apple crumb cake) and she can learn about what she missed on the blog if she wishes).

I had a brochure advertising the Old Spanish Quarter (OSQ) so I showed it to a couple of people, who were happy to point me to places that didn't pan out. This is one place someone pointed out - it's not OSQ, but still looked interesting. The waterwheel was originally used to turn a grist mill for grinding corn or wheat into flour. It's now a tavern however and the waterwheel looks like it's turned by a motor - but it turns.

Even though this wasn't the right place, a few doors farther down was a small sign above a door saying "The Old Spanish Quarter". This was the opening to a fairly large group of structures and yards that have been reconstructed on their original locations in the 1740's style. Each had characters in period costume who interpret the daily activities for people in that era. It is a 'Living History Museum' and was well worth staying the extra day. The buildings are reproductions on the sites of the original buildings. Here are a couple of thumbnails (click to enlarge and get more info) of some - the reproduction is built of the same materials and style as the originals (tabby, pine & cypress, etc.)

Inside I met John, who represented a Church Scribe from the 1740's.

This was a typical two room house for that era. He had a sparse bedroom and a second room where he did his work as well as cooking or any other activities.

There were about 2,000 people living in St. Augustine in that period, only about 10% could read and write. There were about 15 scribes (people who read/wrote professionally) in three different classes. Clerks kept official records. Secretaries wrote/read letters or documents for people (for a fee), and the Church Scribe, which was a high end clerk.

Normally, writing was done with a very small script because paper was so expensive and difficult to obtain. Parchment could also be used, but was VERY expensive. (Parchment is made from sheepskin, soaked in lanolin from sheeps fat to preserve it). Only proclaimations or announcements would use large letters such as the ones John demonstrated for me. This sort of writing is more drawing then writing (a form of artwork). John makes his own quill pens. In Spain, these would have been from Goose flight feathers, but they didn't have any geese in St. Augustine so he makes his pens from Peafowl feathers from the Fountain of Youth park we visited yesterday. John said that once he learned to make his own pens, he could never go back to metal ones (the 2008 John speaking I believe).

This is what he wrote for me, the line with 'La Familia Johnston':

Since the scribe had finished my commission, I moved on to the Blacksmith Shop, the Herrero. This looked about the same as British and American blacksmith shops we'd seen earlier on or trip except for the bellows. The Spanish used something called a concertina, which pumped the bellows by moving boards back and forth. The affect was the same however.

The blacksmith was making a candle holder and the man pumping the bellows gave me a nice commentary on the Spanish of this era. It is clear this group of living history interpretors have really studied their history! The man working the bellows said he felt the reason Spain's development fell behind the rest of Europe was because of their staunch Catholicism and associated embrace of Scholasticism, whereas the more Protestant areas had moved on to Humanism.

I also learned that iron was very expensive in 1740's St. Augustine. 8 nails could be bought for one Peso (or a pieces of 8, aka 8 Reale coin - the most common coin minted in Spain and the Spainish colonies at the time an used throughout the world for commerce. In fact, the first American coinage after the Rev. War was the silver dollar, inspired by the Peso and made from a similar weight and size). To put this in perspective, the average commoner in Spain made about 25 peso's a year. An infantry soldier stationed in St. Augustine might make 200 peso's a year, but part of that was paid in rations. So there weren't very many coins circulating in St. Augustine and most commerce was by barter. But at 8 nails for a peso, most houses were built with wooden pegs ("tree nails") and used iron nails or other iron components only when absolutely necessary.

Just beyond the blacksmith shop was a carpintero, or carpenter. Brad was working on a small wood carving when I stopped by. In the 1740's, woodworkers in St. Augustine repaired furniture, made small items and assisted in constructing buildings.

I asked Brad where he got his tools from, knowing that Toledo, Spain was known to produce superior steel. No, he did not get his tools from Toledo. Their steel was just famous for making swords. Everybody knew that the best and most affordable tools came from Britain. In fact, when British ships were not in the harbor to attack St. Augustine, they were often in the harbor to trade with the local citizens. So the woodworker got his chisels and tools from England. Once again the Spanish merchants (in Toledo this time) did not sieze the opportunity to branch out into new products in demand, but were content to stay with what they knew while other producers (Britain) jumped in to meet the customer demands.

As in all the other buildings, the Gallegos house also had a 'costumed interpreter' working as Senora Gallegos. I met her while she was tending medicinal plants in her garden, including Yarrow and Comfrey. By the way, this locaion is where the garden actually was, but originally it was about twice as long as it is now.

Since her husband was a sergent, they were slightly better off than some townsfolk - but still had very little cash. Like many housewives, she would barter to get things the family needed and also engage in some sort of industry to help the family, whether it was growing extra things in the garden to sell (or barter) or sewing for some of the single soldiers. Here is an example of her bobbin weaving.

The Gallegos home also had a large bed, but only the adults had a bed. The childred would have 'sofa' beds that were rolled up during the day. They look (and are) basically straw sacks. You could hit them to fluff them up a bit before bedding down for the night - or 'hit the sack'.

The main room also had a brassaro in it, but much larger then the other's I'd seen. Still, since it is much warmer in St. Augustine then in the north American colonies, this might make more sense then a large fireplace. Also, wood was scarce around St. Augustine by the mid 1700's. What trees hadn't been cut down for fire or building materials would have been removed to give the Castillo de San Marcos a clear range of fire.

The kitchen had a really nice valda, or hanging shelf similar to the one in the Scribes house (now I want one for my kitchen!).

But the most interesting part of the kitchen was the stove. This was basically a brick (Coquina) structure called a fogon and was common around the Mediterranean. Senora Gallegos said historians have even traced it's use to ancient Rome! The opening in the top holds charcoal and has a grate that can be placed over it for kettles or roasting spits. This does not have a baking oven. Senior Gallegos prepares her daily bread dough, then has one of the kids take it to a baker down the street. She sends a little extra for the baker to keep (or sell elsewhere) to pay for baking her loaves - the source of the term 'bakers dozen' (make 13 loaves, give one to the baker in exchange for baking the other 12). While barter resulted in many petty disputes, it was the only choice they had since they didn't have much free currancy.

After learning about all this stuff, I still had one more stop today in OSP, the Gomez house. It is now the leater workers house and Mark and Moroquinero were busy making a leather beer mug.

The Spanish did not use dairy cattle, at least not in St. Augustine (they used Olive Oil for cooking, not butter). They did however keep beef cattle on Anastasia Island for rations. The hides would be tanned up north on the St. Johns River (present day Jacksonville) and used to make all sorts of bags, pouches, shoes and mugs. It takes several hours to make a beer mug, and the completed mug needed to be soaked in beeswax or pine tar to seal it. I asked if maybe it wouldn't be easier to make their mugs out of pottery, but it seems the Spanish never established pottery in St. Augustine. This was always just a support community for the Castillo de San Marcos, it was never intended to provide industry and profit on it's own as Jamestown and Plymouth were.

So, having visited several houses, worked shops and 'costumed interpreters' I fully expected to see lots of tempting crafts type things for sale at the gift shop. That was not the case however and I escaped with most of my limited peso's intact (other than for an absolutely essential book). I can however highly recommend that if you are ever in St. Augustine, leave yourself enough time to visit the "Old Spanish Quarter" living history museum.

Across the street from OSQ was a very old wooden building touting itself as the "Oldest Wooden School" in America. It's quite the tourist focus, but probably does live up to it's claim. The building was constructed of red cedar and cypress between 1780 and 1788 as a dwelling. It was used as a school in the early 1800's, then again from 1854 to 1864. The structure is original.

The interior is a little corny, you can push a button and the figures play a recorded talk. However, they were all set up during a reunion from the last class of students (from 1864) in 1931 as to how the room was laid out, where the students sat, types of cloths they wore, etc., so corny or not it's probably quite authentic. They have found a record that in 1858, students paid $0.25/week for schooling, although this was often in goods or services (such as chopping firewood).

Finally I headed back to the RV to see how Mom was doing and also to start thinking about heading out of town. Of course, on the way back I had to stop at a chocolate shop and a couple other places. And of course, Mom was fine and had decided to fix lunch, so I added my goodies as the dessert course and we ate quite well. Just around the corner was an old drugstore from the 1800's that had saved a lot of thier original inventory as a museum, so Mom joined me in checking this out in honor of all the medical folks in our family.

Now I was ready to leave town. Yes, believe it or not - we finally left Saint Augustine. There were still several things I'd like to have seen (or heard as in the case of a pipe organ) - but we must get moving again or we'll never get home. Now we are officially on the road home. Key West was the 1/2 way point, but we had skipped most of Florida to get to Miami while my son was on winter break - so now we've visited the east coast of Florida and can really start west in earnest.

Mom wanted to get off the freeway after we'd driven a couple of hours and take Hwy 90 instead, although I'm not sure why - maybe she wanted to get back to being a tourist after having spent the morning in the RV (or got her second wind back)? Anyway, shortly after we did this, we passed signs about an "Olustee Battlefield Historic State Park". We went ahead and pulled in. This is the location of a 1864 Civil War battle where the Union attacked Confederate defenders so they could cut off supplies to the Confederate Army operating up north. There was a small, unmanned visitors center with several displays about the battle and the war in general, a monument outside, and walking trails and signage to help explain what happened. As Civil War battles go, this one was neither large nor decisive, but it was quite bloody for a 1/2 battle and was the largest Civil War battle fought in Florida.

It was very quiet the day we stopped by, but in mid February, a large, multi day re-enactment is planned and I expect the place will really come alive.

We left the battlefield and continued heading west. Closer to Lake City we saw a camping sign for Ocean Pond, part of the Osceola National Forest. We stopped in for the night, had good, warm showers and a good internet signal for the last time in several days.

Musings:

Just to keep the placeholder readers current, today we visited the Suwannee River where Florida has a Stephen Foster Museum and Carillon. We got as far as Tallahassee and decided to drive down to the coast rather than stay on I-10. Along the way we stopped at a Leon Sinks (USFS site in Apalachicola National Forest - a sink hole complex). I walked part of the trail while Mom rested. It's been pouring rain all day but we've made it part way across Florida and taken in a couple of interesting sights. Tonight we're on a waterfront campground on the gulf coast, very nice and about 1/2 the cost of the one we stayed in near St. Augustine.

Got to sign off now and get some sleep - I plan to do some laundry tommorrow, so may even get this caught up again before heading out?

Logistics:

Miles Driven - 134
Camped at Ocean Pond National Forest CG. Our campsite was not too far from the water (50'?), hot showers, great internet signal over the data modem.

I asked the camp host why it was called Ocean Pond - it seems nobody is quite sure, but when the wind blows the pond is big enough to whip up small waves?

After yesterday's storm, today broke out nice and sunny - if still a little cold. That's OK - we have jackets!

Yesterday when we visited Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, we also learned about another small outpost fort about 14 miles further south on the Matanzas river - Fort Matanzas. Since we had camped a little south of the city anyway, I decide to go ahead and check this out today as long as we were in the area.

Fort Matanzas is located on Rattlesnake Island and can only be accessed by Ferry. The National Park Service maintains the site and provides a free ferry to the fort. This is Mom getting ready to board the ferry.

The Spanish learned that St. Augustine was vulnerable to attack from the river, so built this outpost to guard this approach. The fort was constructed between 1740 and 1742, and had fallen in disrepair by the early 1900's. The National Park Service (NPS) has done a nice job reconstructing it - although they have not coated in in white plaster as it was originally (as shown in the model).

Once we got off the ferry, we were able to get up into the fort by some stairs in the back. Mom and I were the only visitors on the early morning ferry, so had the park rangers to ourselves (of course, I asked a lot of questions and climbed through just about everything that wasn't off limits anyway).

This was only a small outpost. The main fort was Castillo de San Marcos at St. Augustine. Soldiers were sent from there to Fort Matanzas for one month tours. The normal complement was a cabo (officer-in-charge), four infantrymen, and two gunners. More soldiers could be sent to the outpost if needed however. The tower had two rooms, the barracks for the everyone except the cabo was downstairs. Notice, those are Spanish uniforms on the pegs - I'm still not quite used to looking at early colonial American History as a Spanish after having spent so much time learning about the British!

The cabo had the upstairs room to himself. However, since the powder magazine was also accessed via the cabo's quarters, he didn't have a fireplace. If he needed heat, he used a small brossairo.

The gun deck contained five guns, four six-pounders and one 18-pounder. All of the guns could reach the inlet, which was less than 1/2 mile away in 1742.

The fort was used for combat one time only. In 1742 the British took a fleet of 12 ships to the Matanzas inlet, probably to try attacking St. Augustine from the back side. They weren't expecting a fort to be in the river. When the fort's cannons fired on their scout ships, the British fleet packed up and went home. In addition to it's military role, the fort served as a rest stop, coast guard station, and navigation aide for ships headed to St. Augustine by the river.

After finishing our tour of the old fort, we took the ferry back to the mainland. Mom collected some sand and we took note of the beautiful live oak's in the parking lot. (In fact, a man was working on a charcoal sketch of this same tree as we left.)

As you can tell from the above photo's, the sun was out and sky very beautiful today - so I decided to go ahead and climb the St. Augustine Lighthouse. Mom also wanted to visit the museum in the Keeper's quarters. The lighthouse is also on Anastasia Island so was on our way to St. Augustine anyway. The museum had some displays about the lighthouse history and a shipwreck. It also had a nice display of the SPARS, Women in the Coast Guard (Semper Paratus, Always Ready).

This is the same design as the Bodie Lighthouse, but this one is open for climbing. They also have different daymarks (paint schemes). It has a first order Fresnel lens and is 165 feet tall with 219 steps to the gallery. You can get a certificate for climbing it, but you have to buy it.

From the top is a much better view of the St. Augustine Inlet than the one I posted yesterday.

I was hoping to try to get a better shot of the Castillo de San Marcos also, but it was just too far away (maybe if I'd had a DSLR? Of course, it would have to be carried up those 219 steps...)

From the lighthouse, we drove back into St. Augustine and decided to visit the Fountain of Youth park. It is a bit of a tourist trap but they have done a nice job. It also turns out to be the actual location of the Timucua (Tim muck coo aah) village of Seloy. This is where Pedro Menendez first established St. Augustine in 1565. There is some evidence that it is also the site where Juan Ponce de Leon landed in 1513, although that is still somewhat in dispute.

The main claim to fame is a natural mineral spring that was probably no big deal until the idea came to someone to market it to tourists as the fabled 'Fountain of Youth'. It probably was a valued source of mineral water for the Timucua and a reason they located their village here. The Timucua also tended to live a long time, often into their 90's (pre contact of course), so it wouldn't take much imagination to link the mineral water to the long lived Timucua (although their longevity probably had more to do with healthy living in general). Ponce de Leon was reputed to be looking for the 'Fountain of Youth', so it's quite conceiveable that he could have been pointed to this village by such rumors. At any rate, we figured it would be fun to say we'd tasted the water:

There were also some educational programs on navigation techniques during the 1500's, which we both found interesting, and a program on the Spanish colonial period in general - staring a 50 foot globe (in circumference). I do have a couple of pictures from these, but have uploaded so many pic's from today already that I thought I'd pass. If you'd like to see them however, let me know.

Outside were a number of exhibits also, here is another statue of Juan Ponce de Leon. The second is a Spanish Cistern, used to catch rain water from roofs.

They had a couple of exhibits side by side showing two commonly used building materials downhere - neither of which I'd ever heard of. On the left is an example of Coquina, a limestone rock formed from shells. Castillo de San Marcos and Fort Matanzas were built out of coquina. On the right is Tabby, a concrete made from sand, water and oyster shells (for lime). Tabby was also used for buildings and walls when coquina was too expensive.

Also outside were a number of Peafowl - technically Peacocks for male and Peahens for female birds. These are very tame and will eat from your hand (food dispensers conveniently located that run on quarters of course).

The treat was seeing this. These are not that uncommon (surprise to me), but are a recessive genetic mutation so are not as common as the blue variety (they are not albino, as is frequently thought). Neither Mom nor I'd never heard of white peacocks however, so yet again we have learned something new.

The above picture is courtesy of another tourist. He'd seen me taking pictures of the peacocks earlier, so when this one put on a display, he actually ran into the gift shop to find me and let me know. We just continue to meet the nicest people on this trip!

After all of this, we still had time for one more thing today. I wanted to see the Old Spanish Quarter and Mom wanted to see the Old Florida Museum. After some minor discussion, we agreed to do the Old Florida Museum and I kept the option open to stay over another day (or part of a day) to see the Old Spanish Quarter. See, we can compromise when we need to - everybody gets what they want!

Mom wanted to see the Florida Museum since they had a lot of hands on exhibits. However, they are geared for school groups so when one or two people come through on there own, they don't have the staff to demonstrate anything - it's just a self guided tour, which isn't quite as interesting. There are three basic exhibits - an 1800's homestead & school, a Spanish era home, and a Timucua hut - with associated activites at each exhibit.

Here are the thumbnails for the exhibits and hands on activities - you can click to enlarge or get more information about individual shots.

Here are a couple of shots from the 1800's homestead cabin & school (my shots of the other buildings didn't come out very well).

So on the one hand we were both a little disappointed in the place - but we also got to try out some things and did learn a few more things, so it wasn't exactly a bad idea to visit it. But of course by this time Mom really was tired and we needed to quit for today. That's when the trolley driver, Vince, kicked in. He had picked us up earlier in the day and saw that Mom was tired and really made sure he took care of her. His kindness will stick with us for some time.

At this point, we probably had time to make it to the state park to camp, but decided instead to go back to Wal-mart rather then try to rush it. So while Mom rested, I decided to walk around the grounds a bit and try to get some better shots of the Great Cross than I'd been able to get from the Trolley yesterday. (We had parked at the Nombre de Dios Mission, site of the first Mass or Christian service performed in America the day after Pedro Menendez landed.) The cross was erected to celebrate the 400th anniversary of that event.

We then had a bite to eat and finally called it a night - we saw a lot today didn't we!

FYI - if you're new to the blog:

When I don't have time to complete an entry, I try to at least write a short stub (Placeholder) so our friends and family back home know where we are and that we're all right. Then when I get the entry rewritten, including Photo's, I change the title from (Placeholder) to (Photo's Added). If I get the full entry written on a current basis, there are no qualifiers in the title, so if it doesn't say (Placeholder), it's the final entry with photo's.

Logistics:

Miles Driven: 34 (RT)
Camped at St. Augustine Wal-mart

I was planning to combine all of Saint Augustine in a single blog entry, but it would just be too long. So I'll write a separate entry for each day instead, as has been my usual practice.

When we got up this morning, it was partly overcast and we had a beautiful sunrise over the beach. We live on the west coast, so this is what I expect to see for a sunset - not a sunrise, so it was a little different for us.

How does that ditty go? "Red sky in the morning, Sailors take warning." Yes, the cloud cover thickened as the morning progressed and soon the rain and lightening started in earnest. Being from the Seattle area, we never leave home without a raincoat, so we donned ours and got on with our sightseeing. However due to the lightning, a couple of things shut down pretty quickly - such as the lighthouse. We stopped by, but when we found out it was closed due to the lighting, decided to try again later.

The campground where we stayed last night as well as the lighthouse were both on Anastasia Island. An old, historic bridge called the Lion Bridge used to connect Anastasia Island to the mainland. A somewhat newer draw bridge replaced it, but also blocked the view of the historic bridge. The town has decided to rebuild the Lion Bridge, then remove the newer bridge when they are done. For now, you can still see both bridges. A little to the north of the old downtown area you can see the inlet between Anastasia Island and Vilano Beach on the north side.

After crossing the bridge, we moved on to historic Castillo de San Marcos, the oldest surviving masonry fort in the United States. This was started by the Spanish in 1672 and completed in 1695. St. Augustine was primarily settled by the Spanish as a military fortification to protect their treasure fleets from pirates as well as to protect Spain's claim to the new world against British and French incursion. The British actually lay seige to St. Augustine twice, in 1702 and again in 1740, but were not able to take the fort (they did burn the town however). (If it looks a little too sunny, that's because the best picture I had of the overall fort was from Tuesday rather then Sunday, I'm cheating a bit on the dates here. Even so, it's still not a very good picture - just the best I can offer without violating someone elses copyright.)

Here is a 'You were here' picture on the day we actually visited the castillo. The walls were originally covered in white plaster, but very little is left of course (it's 300+ years old).

In truth however, I think you need a helicopter to get a decent shot of the entire fort so will just post this photo of the National Park Service brochure - it gives a much better idea of the overall layout.

There is only one way in and out of the fort. It is protected by something called a Ravelin, a small fortified structure directly in front of the entrance.

The main entrance is also called the "Sally Port", since it's were the soldiers would "Sally Forth" to go into battle. There is a drawbridge on the path to the Ravelin and a second one between the Ravelin and the Sally Port. There is also a moat around the walls, which was filled with water when the fort was actively used by the Spanish for defense.

Inside the fort is a main parade field, called the "Plaza de Armas". (Thumbnail alert - if you're new to the blog, when you see smaller pictures you can click to enlarge.)

Surrounding the Plaza de Armas are the Casemates, including guard rooms, storage rooms, and a chapel. The barracks room pictured is from the period the British occupied the fort. They put in extra floors so they could house more troops in the same space. Today, several of these are used to house museum exhibits and of course a gift shop. Note: the British never captured the Castillo, but obtained it by treaty for a brief period, after which it passed back into Spanish hands by means of another treaty.

Several of the park rangers were dressed in period costume as 1700's Spanish soldiers. They didn't try to be fully 'in character', as some other re-enacters we've encountered, but were quite knowledgeable about the time period and history of the castillo and Saint Augustine.

They pointed out that the replica coins on the table are not representative. There was very little money in St. Augustine in the 1700's, the soldiers weren't paid much to begin with and then paid only once a year. The average private received about 200 Peso's a year. Church tithes and other items were also deducted from their pay and part of their pay was in rations, so very little coin actually was paid the soldiers. Then if the ship carrying the payroll was captured by pirates or lost in a storm, their pay might be delayed for two or three years. If Spain were in dire straits financially (busy with war's, etc.) or just not paying too much attention to their oversea's outposts, they might never catch up on missed payrolls.

By this time the lightening had stopped so the park rangers started allowing people to go up to the 'gun deck' (the roof of the fort). I took several pictures of the four Bastion's, the diamond shapes on the corners. I also took some pictures of the various cannon and mortors - I was a little surprised how little the weapons had changed between this fort and those we'd seen for the Revolutionary War, almost two hundred years later.

The Gift Shop had a good selection of books on the early history of Spanish colonization so I spent far more then I should have to learn more about this period (someday - when I have lots of free time and actually read them?)

St. Augustine has a lot of interesting things to see besides Castillo de San Marcos. We weren't familiar with any of them of course, so decided to take one of the trolley tours. The trolley takes 80 minutes to go through the old part of town and has 21 stops (the ticket includes unlimited on/off privileges) and is good for three days, so it worked out quite well for us. We had some great drivers, including Roy and April, but I'd have to say that Vince takes the cake. He especially took care of Mom and when I tried to thank him with a tip, absolutely refused to accept it - even though tips are normally recommended for trolley drivers.

However, it is also quite difficult to get decent pictures while bouncing along in a trolley at 20 or so mph, so these are the best I can offer...

This is the old city gate. St. Augustine was a walled city, the Spanish established it for military defense and it was attacked several times by pirates and burned by the British. Even though the townsfolk took refuge in the Castillo when attacked, it makes sense that they'd also try to protect their town with gates and walls.

We also drove down a nice street covered with tree's. The tour guide said this is the most photographed street in St. Augustine, it is called Magnolia Blvd. However the Magnolia tree's were killed by a deep frost about a hundred years ago and was replanted with live oaks. It is still quite lovely however and of course these trees are all about a hundred years old.

Here are a couple of the street scenes fairly typical in the old historic district.

There are a couple of notable statues. The first one is of Pedro Menendes de Aviles, who founded St. Augustine on September 8, 1565. The second is Juan Ponce de Leon who first landed in Florida on April 2, 1513 and named it "La Florida", meaning flowery.

(Sorry about the poor light, it's not possible to choose your shots when passing by on a trolley.)

There are a number of historic churches in St. Augustine, not surprisingly. The first is the Grace Methodist Church. The second is the Memorial Presbyterian Church built by Henry Flagler.

Henry Flagler was a much larger figure in St. Augustine history (20th century at least) then just the church. He built an unusually elegant hotel (the Ponce de Leon) that was turned into a liberal arts college in 1988, Flagler College. Louis C. Tiffany was retained for the interior decorating and personally supervised the installation of the curved stained glass dining room windows.

We saw much more than this on the trolley tour, but the rest of my pictures just weren't good enough to post. However, there is a lot of information about St. Augustine available on the internet, including virtual tours and maps - if you've got fast enough internet connections to try them out!

One thing we decided, it would be worth another day here - so will stay over in St. Augustine Monday and take in a few more things.

(It's amazing how much damage I can do with a camera even while being rained out...)

Logistics:

Miles Driven: 14
Camped at St. Augustine Walmart

Before we left the campground this morning, Mom saw this across the road from us and borrowed my camera to snap a picture of him. Good to know she's still enjoying such little things.

Mom hadn't been able to attend chuch for a couple of weeks, so I took her back to Titusville this morning to a Seventh Day Adventist Church I found on the internet. There was also one in Daytona Beach, which wouldn't have required driving backwards, but it was farther and I wouldn't have been able to get her there for the Sabbath School, which she likes. It was a pretty nice church, they had a concert for the main service today. (I forgot to grab the camera before everybody left.)

After the service, we ate a picnic lunch on the lawn behind the Church, which was quite nice.

This took us into the afternoon of course, and since I'd gone back south to get to Titusville, we'd actually gone a negative 10 miles so far today! Since we only had about a 1/2 day left and I wanted to get to Saint Augustine by tonight, I figured we had about enough time for one side trip at the most and it should be Merritt Island NWR. It has something called a "Manatee Observation Area", which sounded promising. We had some doubts after reading my Aunt's comments, but thought maybe they'd fixed the road since her visit so we'd give it a try.

When we got to the turnoff, it appeared to still be a sandy road, but it was quite compacted so I kept going. The observation area was not very far past the turnoff, maybe a block or so? There were a few people around and others fishing on the other side of the canal. I wasn't very optimistic since we'd learned at the Manatee Center that manatee like to go out into the open bay when the weather is nice, but figured it was worth a try.

Wow!

We did see three manatee, they sometimes swam directly in front of us, sometimes off to the side, then back. We stayed there at least 30 minutes and saw manatee's the entire time we were there. The sign says they just like that area, scientists aren't sure why but suspect minerals in the water. Sometimes as many as thirty have been seen at one time - I was just happy to see three.

The first thing you might see is something like this. Often, that's all you see.

The water is shallow enough here to see the animals much better however. For a change, I actually used a filter to good affect here! The water was a little difficult to see through, but with the polarizing filter I could actually see, and photograph the animals much better.

Now, here's the real treat - three manatee's in the wild:

I also wanted to go to the visitors center, but am afraid I didn't check the map first. With Mom navigating, we actually went to the Cape Canaveral National Seashore Visitors Center, not the Merritt Island NWR Visitors Center. So we ended up seeing different things. Merritt Island NWR is a major birding location - but if I upload any more bird pictures I'll probably break Travellerspoint, so maybe it's just as well we went a different direction. We were also running out of time (the Seashore Visitors Center was much farther out of our way), so we didn't take the time to really check out the area as much as we'd have liked.

We did stop by a place called Turtle Mound. Before Juan Ponce de Leon landed in Florida in 1513, there were as many as 40,000 Timucuan people living in this area. The mounds and middens were created as they discarded shells, animal bones and other refuse. By the time the Spanish withdrew from Florida in 1763, there were only a few Timucuan remaining and they went to Spain with the Spanish. Earlier settlers didn't understand the archeological value of these mounds and used many of them for road building material. Turtle Mound is one of the few reminders we have left of the Timucuan. The mound isn't much to see in itself, it is now covered with tree's and brush and the NPS has built a raised trail to the top so you can climb it without damaging the mound. However, when you think about how it was built with only discarded shells & bones, it's pretty impressive (maybe 100' x 50' x 25' tall? That's just my guess from climbing it.)

We stopped at the visitors center and bought a few postcards and such, then hit the road. I was bound and determined to get to Saint Augustine tonight - and we'd used up almost all of the day and were still in the same general area that we'd stayed in last night! So I headed over to the Interstate, I-95, and just drove North. Of course, I picked the most expensive campground in the area (not picked really, I just turned into the first one I could find). It's on the beach however and just a few minutes from St. Augustine. Just for kicks, I decided to check out the beach. Mom was really, really tired, so I thought she'd be asleep before I got back - but no, guess who decided to go for a night walk with me?

Good night - and please enjoy the manatee video! (Didn't want to slow things up trying to edit it and make it fancy, if you turn the sound off - it's not too bad just as is.)

Logistics:

Miles Driven - 149
Camped at Bryn Mawr Campground on the Atlantic Ocean, just outside of St. Augustine, FL

Reluctantly, I pulled myself away from the lovely Long Point County Park and the plethora of exotic birds there. Mom and I had collected quite a bit of books and stuff during our trip to the Key's and since, so really needed to find a Post Office. Our RV is too small to store stuff on such a long trip, so from time to time we just box everything up that we've collected and mail it home. We finally located a PO off the main road in Melbourne and got rid of several pounds of stuff (and $$ to send it) when Mom met Ruth. She is also turning 80 in February and was thrilled to meet Mom and learn about our trip. Instead of getting upset about her age, she's decided to embrace it and is adopting the catch phrase for this year of "80 in 08" - pretty cool.

I figured Cape Canaveral wasn't very far up the road, so I could afford a little time to stop at a couple of beaches (not realizing that I needed more time at the Kennedy Space Center then I left myself of course). At least Brevard County has lots of beaches set aside for public use. We passed a lot of city or county parks along the beaches with plenty of parking (and no nasty RV's Keep Out notes). Most have short boardwalks to get over the sand dunes to the beach (without damaging the dunes). On one of these, we must have seen about a dozen of these little lizards just out sunning themselves. They were only about 3 inches long, so my guess is that they were juveniles.

Several beaches were lined with fishermen. Apparantly, there was a really good run of fish yesterday, so today a lot of folks brought out there poles hoping to clean up. Of course, the fishing wasn't quite as good today. The picture I uploaded doesn't show the fishing, but it is a good view of the beaches looked up here. There are lots of breaking waves, but it is a fairly steep beach, so they break fairly close in.

A little further (Cocoa Beach I think), we found a different sort of wildlife - surfers. The waves were forming a little farther out so this was probably a better beach for surfing (not being a surfer myself, I'm speculating a bit). However, these guys weren't much for surfers either - we watched for quite a while, but this is the closest I could get to any of them standing up on a board. They were very good at sitting on boards in the surf however.

Finally we got to Kennedy Space Center. There is a very large visitors center. Mom had banged her toe in the RV and it was quite black and blue, so I got a wheel chair for her - although she probably needed it anyway, this place was a little too big for her to walk around in even with her walker. Unfortunately, I accidentially left the camera set to 'movie', so when we asked some tourists to take our picture at the entrance - it took a movie. I captured a still frame from it to post, but the quality is poor - but it's one of those 'You Were There' shots, so I had to post it (sorry)

The Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex used to be run by NASA. I haven't visited it previously so can only provide conjecture, but my guess is that it was less flashy but had more meat? Another visitor told us that it used to be much better. A couple of years ago, management of the visitors center was turned over to a private company, who has definitely given it the look and feel of a theme park. I don't mind that so much, but it seemed 'dummed down' too much for my taste. For example, there were plenty of gift shops with lots of brick-a-brack, but only short little tourist overviews. If you want to learn about space travel, NASA, or anything above a 5th grade level, you won't find it here. The same thing is true with the informative signs and plaques around the complex - just summary level information that is designed to be easy to read and absorb, nothing too complicated.

OK now that I got that off my shoulder (there is no pleasing some people), let me tell you about what we did see. First, even if you don't like theme parks, you should probably leave yourself more than 1/2 day as we did - this is a very large complex and there is quite a bit to see. We started with a bus trip around the space center. There were informative videos on the bus and the bus drivers pointed out things along the way. Unfortunately, the bus didn't slow down at all, so it was difficult or impossible to take pictures, but I will tell you this: We saw manatee's, an armadillo, an osprey, a bald eagle, alligators and of course heron and egrets. Yes - there were three manatee's in a pond along the drive. The bus tour was of the space complex - but Cape Canaveral is also home to Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge and NASA works closely with the NWR to protect the wildlife on their facility. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get any shots of the wildlife, the bus just blew by them too fast. But we did see manatees!

The first big complex we drove by is where the Shuttle Orbiter is prepped for missions, then assembled for relaunch with it's external fuel tanks in something called a Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB). This is one of the larger buildings in the world, but is hard to grasp as such because it just stands there kind of by itself. For point of reference, each star on the US Flag is six feet across. There is also some hurricane damage visible on the side of the building.

Another way to refer to the VAB is as the largest single story building in the world. The shuttle is in it's normal, horizontal position when it returns from space and is cleaned up and preped for the next mission. The VAB has giagantic cranes inside that raise it to the vertical position to connect with the fuel tanks. Then leading from the VAB to the launch site is an 8 mile long 'crawlway'. It kind of looks like a light tan highway in these shots, the tan is because it's made of gravel/rock (I doubt if any other surface could manage the weight it has to carry).

The space shuttle/fuel tank assembly is moved from the VAB to the launch site using a giant crawler. There are two of these, the only ones in the world of course. They can move at 1 mph empty, or 1/2 mph fully loaded.

Fortunately for us there was a shuttle sitting on one of the launch pads. It was scheduled to go up this week but the launch has been postponed until February. A lot of people had come to Cape Canaveral to watch the launch, so were disappointed when it was delayed. From what I could tell, this is a fairly frequent occurance these days as NASA tries to eliminate risk from what is an inherently risky venture. Don't get me wrong, if you can prevent another Challenger disaster I think you should, but there is also a cost to avoiding risk too much. Anyway, it was kind of exciting to be able to see a shuttle actually sitting on the pad waiting to be launched.

BTW - at least the revamped visitors complex is very ADA assessable. Many facilities had multiple stories and every one of them had elevators, so Mom didn't have to skip any activities unless she wanted to.

At the overlook between the VAB and the launch sites, they had one of the shuttle main engines on display. It had been retired after 15 shuttle missions (and 63 test firings), a very complex device. (Mom is in the picture, I didn't do a very good job adjusting for the light, so it's pretty dark on that side).

The bus next took us to the Apollo/Saturn V exhibit. First they took us all into a room where they had set up the actual Apollo launch control center, but modified it to run as part of a simulation of a Saturn V launch. It was actually quite good (after all my complaining). The external shots of the engines firing are all on three giant display screens above the control room and the video was quite impressive. This picture is dark, because the control room is dark while a launch is going on - I took one of the room with a flash after the simulation was complete and it just looks dead, so I like this (dark one) better...

We went from the launch control room into a giant building that houses a complete Saturn V rocket, including the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) and Apollo spacecraft.

There are a few exhibits around the room, not many, but a few. Here is a picture of an Apollo space suit and one of Mom touching a moon rock.

After the Apollo exhibit, we got back on the bus to the main visitors center. They have a new ride called the "Shuttle Launch Experience". It is basically an amusement park ride, but based on the space shuttle launch and used a lot of astronaut input to make it as realistic as possible. Camera's and backpacks have to be locked up before the ride so I can't share an pictures except the outside of the building. But the ride shakes and rotates and makes if feel a little like G-forces and of course with a lot of noise and video. It only lasted a couple of minutes but it was a lot of fun. (Mom opted out of this one, but she was able to watch it from the observation room).

In the main part of the visitors comples is a full scale replica of a space shuttle you can walk through and also some of it's external tanks. There were also other exhibits, but by this time the visitors complex was getting ready to close so we had to end our visit here (with a brief stop at the gift shop).

After this, we didn't have enough time left to visit the NWR so drove up the highway and found an RV park. I plan to take Mom to church in the morning, so we'll see - Saturday could be a fairly short blog day again.

Logistics:

Miles Driven - 79
Camped at Holiday Village (RV Campground) in Mims, FL