St. Augustine - The oldest city in America


St. Augustine, Florida is the oldest city in America. 
Below are pics from the campus of Flagler College. On a Saturday afternoon students would tie hammocks between the palms and hang out.  


The main entrance to Flagler College is shown below. It originally opened as the Ponce de Leon Hotel in 1888. Henry Flagler was a partner in Standard Oil and also built the railway down to Key West. That's a statue of Flagler at the entrance.


The photo below is of the Casa Monica Hotel originally opened in 1888. Flagler sold the vacant piece of land to Franklin Smith who developed the hotel to compete with Flagler's. Flagler, through his social and political connections, discouraged his friends from staying at the Monica. So during the peak season of it's first year, the Monica had only 3 rooms occupied that season. As a result it closed and Flagler purchased the property for pennies on the dollar. The hotel business was cut-throat even back then.


We were fortunate enough to be downtown just before the Saturday vigil at the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Augustine and attended mass in this beautiful church.  Each Sunday it's a challenge to find a catholic church that is within walking distance from the marina we are staying in so this was a win- win, we were right in front of it.





Below is a statue of Ponce de Leon, the Founder of Florida. He landed here in 1513.


We saw several weddings going on downtown. I don't think this groom was happy Brent was crashing their wedding trolley.


The statue below is of Don Pedro Menendez De Aviles, the Spanish admiral and explorer credited with founding the city of St. Augustine in 1565. His ships first sighted land on August 28, the feast day of St. Augustine, and was so named.


Saturday evening there was a scheduled Atlas 5 rocket launch from Cape Canaveral and we saw it from the boat. It was pretty cool. The pic doesn't do it justice. You don't see that everyday.


The following day we went back to downtown and took the Old Trolley Tour so we could see all the highlights of the city and cover many miles.



We see many cute tees all the time.



The city is filled with tons of restaurants and shops that line these streets that go on forever with a village like atmosphere.


One of our Trolley stops took us to this Spanish fort guarding the inlet from the ocean to St. Augustine.  The grassy area in the pics is where the moat used to be.





We saw a live reenactment complete with a canon being fired.



This photo above is of one of the walls of the Fort. The entire complex is made of coquina that was quarried from the seabed not far from here. It had to dry out for over a year in order to harden into an adequate building material.



The first permanent Ripley's Believe It or Not opened here in 1950 (in the former winter home of one of Henry Flagler's cronies).


The two photos below were taken along the ICW as we came into the St. Augustine area. The couple below seem to have retirement figured out.

I'm not sure what happened in the second photo, but I do know that tides in this area are 5 to 8 feet in some locations. That's a hard lesson to learn.







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