St. Augustine

ahhh, we feel much better after a good night's sleep!

Luke did awake during the night and notice the Bridge of Lions, all lit up in the dark.  It was really quite spectactular, lights relfected in the still water.  The center area with no lights is the actual opening span.

The city marina here has a launch service - they pick you up at your boat and take you back to it.  It's free, included in the cost of the mooring ball. This is great, as it means that we don't have to take down and put up the dinghy for one trip into town.  We took the 10:00 launch into town this morning.  Haircuts at the local barbershop.  This shop has 7 chairs, all staffed by men and women, and serving everybody.  I was certainly not the only woman getting a haircut.  And we both got good haircuts.

After that (and a slice of wonderfully greasy pizza!) we set out to explore St. Augustine again.  We like the narrow alleys.

The old homes have mostly been converted into shops, museums, or B and B's.

Flagler Collage is always impressive.  We didn't take the tour this time, but like to admire the grandeur of the authentic Spanish Renaissance style architecture.

We found one new church that we hadn't noticed before.  This is Grace United Methodist Church.  Yes, it looks a lot like Flagler!  It turns out that clever Mr. Flagler wanted land adjacent to his Ponce de Leon Hotel (now Flagler Collage).  He wanted to build a courtyard on the property.  But there was already a church on the location that he wanted.  So, he proposed to the church trustees that he would build them a church at a new location if they would give him the land where the current church was located.  They agreed and the new Grace Church was built in 1886 in return for the land.  Now we know why the two buildings look so simiar.

After our leisurely tour of St. A in the 75 degree weather, we took the launch back to Latitudes.  There we watched a beautiful topsail schooner sail lazily out through the bridge.  (we confirmed the schooner type on Luke's schooner T-shirt from Maine!)

Luke took on one chore - putting relfective tape on our mast.  This is the idea of boating buddy Peter.  When returning to the boat after dark, we can pick out Latitudes by shinning the high intensity flashlight beam on masts and watching to see which one shines back at us! lol! Hopefully we won't be terrorizing all of the boats in the anchorage and will just make sure we're headed to the right boat.  I can vouch that that is not always as easy as it should be.

Off tomorrow, heading for New Smyrna Beach, another 60 miles-ish south.  More warm weather!