07/23 Time to visit St. Augustine

Since our truck needs a little work, we rented a car for our trip to St Augustine and dropped the truck off. It took awhile for me to get used to driving a car again but the GPS took us on a route that wasn’t very busy, so it worked out OK.

We celebrated the 2-hour drive to get there with a 2-hour nap, followed by a late lunch at Osteen’s. We shared a 1 1/2 breaded shrimp meal with fruit salad and fries - excellent as usual!

We had driven over over a bridge to get to Osteen’s and on both sides were some familiar-looking lion statues. I really wanted a good look at those so after lunch when we went back across the bridge we found a place to park (finally) and walked over to them. And they look just like my favorite Italian lion statues!  They are literally copies of the "Medici lions" in Florence (one of which dates back to 2nd century!) Made me so happy to find these here, I first saw them in 1999 and have loved them ever since!

Since we already had a parking spot, we went walking around. Nearby is the cathedral of St Augustine, which serves the oldest parish in the US. Very beautiful and respectfully quiet inside.
 
It was still afternoon so we walked towards George Street, home of a wide variety of shops. They all try to be historic in nature, and one of the be newer one is downright prehistoric - in fact, that's the name of the store! Inside were unusual beauties, like a very good replica of a T Rex skull and what I believe is a real mammoth tusk - so jealous, I would love to have either of these!

A lot of the buildings here are old enough that they are build on coquina. It's a sedimentary rock made almost entirely of shell pieces and sand, cemented together by the calcium in the shells. It looks very porous but it seems to last a very long time. 

It really was too hot and humid to be walking around. We tried to counter that by getting some delicious ice cream at Tedi's. 

At the end of George Street are the old cities gates. They are also built out of coquina and were almost torn down in 1900 as an eyesore, until the DAR raised interest in saving them. So glad they did, they are wonderful. 

And just beyond the gates is the Huguenot cemetery. Catholics were buried in the city but eventually they had enough non-Catholics living and dying here that they needed a place to put them. Not in the city (of course) but just outside. I really love old tombstones with old fashioned engravings.  

In spite of the name, there aren’t any Huguenots there, just regular Protestants. Tourists are not allowed inside, which I regretted but totally understood. 

By then it was definitely time to quit. The trip back to the car  was more of a trudge than a walk; we had already seen the area and we didn’t even have ice cream. It was just so hot! I dropped Randy at the hotel then went to Walmart for soda because we are gonna need something cold to drink tomorrow.