St. Augustine Florida

Today the road trip was to St Augustine Florida about 2-3  hours east of Ormond Beach.  St Augustine is the oldest city in the US.  It dates back to 1513 when Ponce de Leon claimed Florida for Spain. At the same time that Spain arrived to Florida so did the French and in 1565 King Phillip II of Spain sent Pedro Memendez to settle Florida and drive out the French.  The French were badly defeated and sent packing.  Spain fought several different wars to keep St Augustine because they believed that it was the keystone in defense of the whole Florida coast.  They also constructed many forts to protect the coastline, the one in St Augustine was called Castilllo de San Marcos!  Yes another San Marcos, they are everywhere.

We rode our bikes around town so I took many pictures to look at.  Our first stop was to a restaurant called Scarlett Ohara's (Frankly I don't give a damn) and it was decorated with Gone with the wind photos etc.  It also had a supposed ghost that lived upstairs...

In the middle of town is a beautiful Spanish Renaissance building from 1888 which was once the Hotel Ponce de Leon owned by Henry Flagler (Standard Oil partner of Rockefeller).  It is now the Flagler College a four year co-ed liberal arts college, I would love to go to this school, it is so beautiful.  There are many lovely buildings in town, tomorrow we will probably go to the Lightner Museum which used to be the Alcazar hotel built in 1888 by Henry Flagler.  The streets are filled with old historic homes, some dating back to 1700's.  We stopped by the oldest house in St Augustine which is now National Historic Landmark.  We also went to visit another great Lighthouse " St. Augustine Lighthouse, it stands 165 ft and has a first order Fresnel lens which casts a light that can be seen up to 20 miles out to sea.  It has 219 steps which we did not go up, since we are still recoverying from yesterdays climb up the Ponce de Leon Lighthouse.

Tomorrow we may do a Food Tour around town, it is a 5 star rated tour, should be great.  There are many fabulous churches here in town:
Basilica Cathedral
Memorial Presbyterian Church
Trinity Episcopal Church
Grace Unted Methodist Church


I will attached some of the gorgeous photos I took of the churches.
St. Augustine reminds me of both New Orleans and Key West, it has history and beautiful beaches what more could you ask for.

We also decided to check out the Marine out of water storage area and we may decide to leave our boat on the hard this season, it is much cheaper then the Yacht Club in Tampa and it is closer to the Bahamas.