Sunday 10 June: St. Augustine – visit Castillo de San Marcos and trolley tour
Another massive sleep for Capt. & Mrs.Sansom – not waking till 10am! Clearly we are still catching up on sleep after the 12 day passage.
Another glorious day. No wonder they call Florida The Sunshine State. First sightseeing of the day is a walk around the old Spanish Fort, Castillo de San Marcos, which guarded St. Augustine for hundreds of years, repelling several English sieges. They perform a cannon firing demonstration but it’s later in the day, so off we trot back into town to take the trolley scenic tour. On the way, we need a cool off after the very hot walk, so we stop for drinks at The Backyard at Meehan’s Irish pub where Oana has good old American iced tea. Ok, she says, that box is ticked, but I won’t have another, thank you!
The trolley tour is 1 1/2 hours meandering around the old town. Excepting the commentary we could have walked faster! But we think we learned a few more facts about the town and its history. It’s really set up for tourists, with pretty much everything possible that is old, highlighted as the oldest in USA … the oldest town, oldest wooden school, oldest house, oldest poured-concrete building even!
As the trolley passes the fort we jump off as it is 15 minutes before the live cannon firing. There are 7 men in the team that fire the cannon, all dressed in period Spanish costumes, with the lead gunner shouting orders in Spanish. When it goes off there is one very big bang and you can imagine, a little bit, how a battle may have sounded.
All very nicely done and the fort very authentic. A piece of European history stuck in USA, reminding us of the struggles between English, French, Spanish and Dutch that lasted centuries as they all fought for these New World lands. Oh, and the native Indians too of course. In the 1800s the fort was used to hold captured Indians to “re-educate them”.
Just as we finish with the fort the heavens open and we run for the first trolley to get shelter and complete the tour, and by 5 pm we are starving. Time for some poison – we go to a pizza restaurant and fill ourselves full of delicious carbs! Pizza Time, the 2nd best pizza in America they advertise it. As we walk out we swear we don’t even want to see the word pizza for at least a week! We must confess that we managed to fit some ice-cream too.
We continue to wander the town till dusk, then take the dinghy on a tour. Up river on one bank and back down on the other. Each bank is lined with private waterfront homes, each with a jetty and most with power boats raised out the water at the end of the jetty.
Back on Cloudy Bay the wonderful cool evening breeze comes through the boat. We got breeze in Caribbean but it was always humid and not really cooling till late at night. Tomorrow we shall seek out a rental car and head to Cape Canaveral space center and maybe to Miami.