Beautiful Day in St. Augustine

 

Today we spent the day in St. Augustine. Our first stop was the Fountain of Youth, an archaeological site with lots of Native and Spanish background.

Here I am drinking from the Fountain of Youth.

This is a diorama of Ponce de Leon meeting the Native chief.

There were peafowl wandering about the grounds.

They also had a collection of native plants, like these prickly pears.

This is a replica of a hut the Natives would have lived in.

There was a whole area dedicated to crafts.

This is a replica of the original chapel.

This is an anchor.

This is a copper cauldron.

I love these two peahens. They're like, Yaasss, Queens!

Our next stop was to get some Cuban coffee, and then we went to the Shrine of Our Lady of La Leche. This is a photo of the inside of the shrine.

Here is the outside of the shrine.

There were some very old graves on the site.

These are dioramas inside the free museum there.

We then paid to take a trolley tour. This is a great deal, because you can get on and off the trolley an unlimited number of times, and it has like eighteen stops at points of interest.

This is the old fortress.

This is the Huguenot cemetery.

This statue is of Henry Flagler. He was sort of the mob boss of St. Augustine. He controlled everything, and strange things would happen to his rivals, like unexplained fires or railroad delays.

These are photos of Flagler College, which used to be a luxury hotel.

This was the old nightclub venue for the hotel, now a museum.

Flagler College again.

The Episcopal Church has Tiffany windows.

This is a lighthouse on the other side of the harbor.

This is the oldest house in St. Augustine.

Here are a couple of other beautiful houses.

For lunch we went to an Irish restaurant, Meehan's. Here was our view during lunch.

This is the bridge for A1A, which is a drawbridge.

Here the drawbridge is raised.

This stallion made out of car bumpers was given to the Denver Broncos when they played the Giants in the Super Bowl. Had they won, this would probably be at their stadium; since they lost, it's at the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum.

This 600 year old live oak is called Old Senator, they say because it's crooked and shady.

Look! A baby palm tree is growing in the branches!

Maybe this is the mother palm tree.

Some cool signage.

This is what the trolley looked like. They all had three sections.

After that we went to a nearby antique shop, where Travalon bought old postcards and I bought a necklace. Here was our view walking back to the car.

As we drove through town, we saw a horse with its hooves painted blue!

And this bar called Tini Martinis that looks like a Christmas tree. This photo isn't as good because I took it with Travalon's good camera from the car.

We drove over the drawbridge and followed A1A till we got to the beach of the River to Sea Preserve. It has a lot of cool rock formations.

Three people in ultralights passed by going south, then this one came back north.

 We drove until reaching Flagler Beach. We had to park in a neighborhood and walk to it. This is the house we parked in front of - why are people in Wisconsin so averse to bright colors on their houses? I love it!

This pier that Travalon used to fish from is now closed.

We saw a pelican flying over the waves.

We saw three kinds of sandpipers.

And on our walk back to the car, we saw this... ibis? 

Here is the front of that colorful house. So beautiful!

We drove through Daytona Beach and saw all sorts of crazy things there, like what appeared to be an amusement park ride but with no signage to explain it. We are staying in Melbourne, Florida, and we went to grab a bite at a sushi restaurant. Our waitress was human, but there was also this robot waitress.

The front was even cuter - it was a very kawaii cat called Bella. I don't know why Bella didn't wait on us, or why we were charged an 18% service fee. We assumed that was a tip and just left a couple of bucks to make it over 20%, but what if the waitress doesn't get the "service fee"? I mean, what is it, even? Is that just how things are in Florida, that they tack on extra charges to your meal? I hope we weren't charged a service fee for Bella, since she never waited on us. That would just be adding insult to injury.

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