Tuesday, November 16, 2010

St. Augustine, FL

Our unexpected stop in St Augustine, Florida turned out to be a great visit. We spent 6 nights here and had a lot of fun. Our only difficulty was deciding where to eat dinner. Many, many tasty options.

We spent the first two nights on Anastasia Island and toured the light house and an alligator farm. The light house was built in 1874 and is still in operation as an official aid to navigation. Jen took Quinn to the Alligator Farm while I took care of some maintenance chores.

After the two days on Anastasia Island we moved over to the St Augustine City Docks. St Augustine has a wonderful waterfront district with a lot of things to see and do. Quinn and my favorite is the Castillo De San Marcos fort. This fort was built by the Spanish to protect St Augustine from the British and French as well as pirates in the late 1600's. It is still in excellent condition and is maintained by the US National Park Service. The best part was watching as one of the original cannons was fired over the bay.

We were lucky to discover it was Pirates Weekend this weekend in St Augustine and we enjoyed that festival quite a lot. Magic shows, pirate skits, a climbing wall and lots of bouncy things to climb on kept Quinn very entertained.

Yesterday I spent the day waxing the starboard hull. I had waxed the port hull in Norfolk. This is NOT my favorite way to spend a day, but since this is the last floating dock we'll be on for a long time, it needed to be taken care of.

Kathy and John of Oceana arrived yesterday afternoon and we joined them for dinner at The Tasting Room. Fantastic tapas and the service was very good. If you like tapas, don't miss this place if you come to St Augustine.

Tomorrow we leave for Ft Lauderdale. The huge system that was creating all the big seas is gone and today's cold front should give us favorable winds.

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