St. Augustine, FL- February 15, 2026

      Our hotel, once we found one last night, was adequate but quirky.  The room was not quite as big as it should have been to fit two double beds.  We mentioned the keys in yesterday's entry.  We were on the second floor.  The elevator down had a label on the inside of the door that said, "Doors open slowly."  It seemed odd when we first read it, but we found out why when we went down to the lobby.  The elevator sits for an uncomfortably long period of time before the doors actually open.  Scott had experienced it first last night, and Julie did too when she went down for drinks.  Even when you  know what's coming, it seems for a moment that you might be trapped in the elevator.  Julie's claustrophobia did not do well here.

     Once we had an early hotel breakfast, we set the GPS for our first real stop in St. Augustine.  Of course, we stopped at the welcome center at the Florida line hoping to get some orange juice samples.  We arrived a few minutes before they were open, but that gave Abby a chance to skip, run and gallop a little bit.  At 8:00, they opened the doors, but there was no orange juice.  They are going to be starting renovations soon and are preparing to move to a temporary trailer as a location.  All of the brochure racks were empty too, but we got some information, Abby got a sticker book, and we continued on our way.  (Julie said that not getting orange juice here made her a little sad, but the sugar in it probably would have gotten her sick anyway.) 

     Our first stop was the Castillo de San Marco, the 17th century fortress that Spain had built to defend their empire and Saint Augustine.  We had heard that the fort gets very busy during the day, so we had decided to make it our first stop.  It was built between 1672 and 1695 by Spain.  One of the reasons that it took so long is that it is built out of coquina which is a material that is made largely of old sea shells, turned into a sort of concrete.  This material was great to use for a fortification because English cannonballs simply sank into the material instead of shattering it, making the fort nearly impregnable.  Without it, the Spanish settlers in Saint Augustine were quite vulnerable.  A raid by Englishman Sir Francis Drake in 1586 inspired the building of the stone fortification.  After the fort was built it withstood two major British sieges (in 1702 and 1740) and was never taken by force.  It did change hands as the territory of Florida was exchanged, first to the British after the French and Indian War ended in 1763, then back to the Spanish after the Revolutionary War was over in 1783, then to the Americans when the purchased Florida in 1821.  It is run by the National Park Service as a National Monument.

     Abby was eager to run around, though Dad wanted to take a slower look at many of the exhibits.  We first found a room where graffiti from soldiers has been uncovered and is being preserved.  The wall carving includes Spanish writing whose meaning is a bit mysterious and pictures of ships flying various flags.    We went up to the "terreplain" which is the deck that circles the inside of the fort with its distinctive looking watchtowers.  From this level we saw some nice views of the surrounding water and area.  Scott listened to one of the fort's interpreters tell the story of the "pirate" attack, but since he didn't hear the beginning of the story, he didn't realize that it was the story of Drake's attack.  We returned to the lower level of the fort, where Scott watched a video about the fort.  It included all footage of all the steps of the artillery drill and the loading and firing of the muskets.  It seemed to Scott that the Spanish included names on many intermediary steps that the English (and later the Americans) would leave out for the sake of brevity and efficiency, no doubt.  Emma, Abby and Julie strolled through the fort a little faster than Scott did.  They were ready to leave when Scott was just starting to look in the museum shop.  He ended buying a book about the fort, a book about the Revolutionary War sites in the National Park Service, and a patch to hang with his patches from other forts at school.  The blue uniformed Spanish soldiers (from the 1740s, Scott thinks, which was the time of that the English besieged the fort) were getting ready to demonstrate the artillery.  We knew Abby wouldn't like that, so the girls went out towards the parking lot and sat by the river.  Scott watched the drill from down below in front of the fort walls.  The crew fired a mortar, though their linstock went out because the wind was so strong today, and it had to be re-lit with a modern lighter.  ("Been there," thought Scott sympathetically.)  After it fired we were ready to leave the fort and explore the town of St. Augustine.

    Julie had located a big parking ramp near the city's Visitor Information Center, so we headed there.  St. Augustine is the oldest continually inhabited city in the United States and was first settled in 1565, long before both Jamestown and Plymouth for the English colonies.  The Visitor Information Center was quite big inside and included many archaeological artifacts from the city's long history, sorted by time period.  One artifact that was featured was a 400 year old sword that was recovered from the shipwreck of the Nuestra Señora de Atocha in 1622 in the Florida keys.  Abby bought some 3-D printed characters in the gift shop there, but the girls were getting hungry and wanted to find a place for lunch.

    We headed through the historic city gates onto St. George Street.   This area is the pedestrian only street that runs through the oldest part of town.  Most, if not all, of the buildings are marked with plaques saying what they originally were and when the were rebuilt or restored.  Many of these structures seem to date from the 1960s, when St. Augustine celebrated its 400th anniversary, but they often used existing foundations and remnants of the earlier structures that they represent.  The buildings themselves are filled with many different restaurants and gift shops that run the gamut from trendy to tacky.   When we heard about it, we knew it was an area that we wanted to explore when we got to St. Augustine.   It seemed crowded to us today, and Julie wondered what it was like in the summer.  Its a very dog-friendly city though, and many people were walking theirs.  The temperature was in the high 60s and very comfortable, though the winds could pick up pretty strongly from time to time.  It fluctuated from sunny to mostly overcast.  We just enjoyed being outside in shorts.

     Lunch was at a place called Auggie's Draft Room, which was a small little sports bar, but we were interested in taking the food outside and enjoying the weather.  After lunch, we split up.  Emma wanted to do some things on her own.  Julie, Scott and Abby explored many of the shops on St. George street.  Julie had fun and said there was a lot of "boho" (bohemian) stuff.   When we had gone a few blocks, Abby asked for ice cream so we treated her to a bowl of chocolate gelato at a place called Café del Hidalgo.  We had been heading south on St. George Street, but turned left at Hipolita and headed a few blocks east and looked in a few more shops, including one at the Shipwreck Museum and an Irish specialty shop.  Abby was getting tired though.  We thought the gelato would pick her up (the way it had to her sisters in Venice).  Instead, she was both tired but wound.

     We had seen the "trolley tours" going by all day, and Julie had mentioned that she would like to take one to get an overview of the town.   There are many places to buy tickets, so we found one near us and waited for the next tram to come.   It is a step-on/step-off tour, so you can get off at any of the stops and board the next trolley.  We had to wait at a stop for a while until one came, but since no one got off then, there wasn't any room for us and we had to wait for the next one.  Eventually, we did get on one of the green and orange trolleys, though, and we had a nice time seeing much more of St. Augustine than we would have otherwise.  From our seats in We saw the grounds of Flagler College.  Its main building used to be the luxurious Ponce de León Hotel, built by the entrepreneur Henry Flagler in the 1880s.  It's quite an attraction itself and his early projects helped to make Florida into a vacation destination.  Nearby, we saw the Lightner Museum, which was Emma's destination.   It had previously been the Hotel Alcazar, another Flagler project and had the world's largest indoor swimming pool.  After it went out of business, Otto Lightner, a Chicago millionaire, used the building to store his many collections in, including his art collection, which is where the museum ended up getting its start.   We went past a church that Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at before a march in St. Augustine and heard a part of the speech that he gave there.     There were several eccentric millionaires homes that were repurposed including the Villa Zorayda and the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum, all of which had varying degrees of mixtures of Spanish and Arab architectural features.  We enjoyed the ride around, feeling the wind and the warm air.    Before we even got on the trolley, Abby said that she would probably fall asleep on it.  We were hoping that was true, but through the whole ride though, Abby struggled to stay awake and never did take a nap. 

      Emma seems to have had a good time on her own.  She went to the Lightner Museum and then did some shopping on George Street.  We had told her we would meet her at the parking garage at 3:00.  A little after 2:00, though, Julie's phone rang.  Emma had gotten something in her eye from one of the wind gusts that were stirring things up here and there.  She had gone to the restrooms in the visitors center and tried to wash it out but it didn't seem to be working.   We wanted to help her, but we were stuck on the trolley tour until the loop brought us to that area.  We saw the "Old Senator", a live oak tree that is estimated to be over 600 years old-- older even then St. Augustine itself.  We went past the "Fountain of Youth," which claims to be the one that was found by Ponce de León found in 1513.  It seems very  tourist trappy, but Scott said it was on his list to go to if we had more time here.  We'll save it for "next time."  Julie has both the Shipwreck Museum and the Pirate Museum on her list.

     When we did find Emma at the visitor center, her eye seemed to be getting better.  Julie said that Emma's "eye juices" must have taken care of the problem.  We made our way to our hotel for tonight.  (After last night's fiasco, we had called ahead to make sure we had a room.)  We crossed the pretty "Bridge of Lions" to the interestingly named Anastasia Island.   We thought that the hotel was actually going to be on the beach, but it's across the street from it instead.  Our room is right by the pool and Abby was excited to go in that instead.  It's an outdoor pool and we had to wait for some loud local high school boys to get chased out pool by the hotel workers.  Abby didn't do much more than stick her feet in the cold water.  Then she would go over to where Julie had her feet in the hot tub and put her feet in there.  The cold water tired her out though, so shortly after we came back in, she fell fast asleep.  It was about 4:30 in the afternoon.  Her sister Emma had also laid down for a nap.  So we put our plans for dinner and a walk on the beach on hold.  We ended up ordering some "beach pizza" from a local pizzeria and a sub for Emma.  ("Beach pizza" is what Julie calls the barely adequate pizza that we seem to get when we're near a beach- Virginia Beach, the Outer Banks, and places like that.)  It's probably fine that we didn't go out because a Florida storm blew in about 5:00 and it rained hard for a while.  (In fact, there was a watch posted for those things that start with t- and end with -ornado.  We'd better not see any if only because we'll never convince Abby to leave New York State again.)