We got up fairly early this morning (between 7 and 8 am) so that we could still say goodbye to Susy before she took off for work, and so that there would be ample time after breakfast to have Kevin show us the major building project he has been working on: a tiny house (I bedroom, living room, kitchen) with a fairly ramshackle second house/studio/garage that he has been fixing up so that they can rent it out to a student when it is all done—they bought the lot basically for the price of the land, but he is putting a ton of sweat equity into getting the little house into shape. It’s clearly a lot of work but also a great project that is really all his own. We duly admired his progress, and then it was time to say good bye to Kevin and go—we packed up the car and were on the road again. It was so nice that they put us up!
We started out by taking the road out to the Atlantic coast and heading just a tiny bit south to go to Fort Matanzas, a spot on an island down river from St. Augustine that became a small fort for the Spanish to watch out for attacks from the south (also, initially, the spot where the Spanish slaughtered a bunch of French Huguenots just before they founded St. Augustine in the late 16th century). There is a state park with a free ferry for about 30 people at a time, and we caught the 11:30 ferry just fine, got the ranger’s tour of the fort (complete with climbing on top for a view all around), and it was really interesting – but also already very hot, so I had to keep finding shade. After we got back to shore, we found a café on the way to St. Augustine to have lunch (salads for a change, but mine was a disappointment, because the dressing was much too sweet), and then we drove on to St. Augustine proper.
We went along the beach route, which got us to the Lighthouse fairly quickly, and while we decided that it was much too hot for everything else St. A. had to offer, we did climb up the lighthouse tower for a beautiful view of the historic downtown, the waterway, and the Atlantic, and then spent quite a bit of time in the air-conditioned light-keeper house looking at the artefacts and cooling down. We took a 10-minute driving tour of Victorian monstrosities that Henry Flagler built in St. Augustine in the name of early Florida tourism (the massive Ponce de Leon Hotel is now the main building of Henry Flagler College; another of his massive projects is a museum—we already encounters his zeal for making money through tourism because he built the railroad to the Florida Keys that later became the tail end of the A1A, all the way out to Key West. Today, we were driving the very other end of the A1A up the coast.)
Then we left St. Augustine behind; our dashboard display claimed that it was 98 outside, and we were not ready to explore a city full of touristy crap (Ripley’s Believe It Or Not and such like) in this kind of heat!
Instead, we drove on along the coast, stopping once at a public beach just to make sure that we could still dip our feet in, and going through a beautiful conservation area and then a number of beach towns – Ponte Vedra, Jacksonville Beach, etc. – none of which were appealing since they were rather urban. We could also see a storm coming and then drove through a downpour, so the hope was we might be a bit cooler if we drove on a bit more. Then we discovered to our great delight that there was this very cool ferry that connected the very tip of the A1A outside of these beach towns, in Mayport, to Fort George Island. It’s only a .9 mile trip, but it saves 28 miles of going around this entire complicated bay with a lot of little islands and estuary sandbanks and whatnot. Plus, we got to be on a ferry with our Prius! It was a lot of fun and took barely 10 minutes. On the other side, we kept on driving on the A1A (our road of the day) until we had gone across a couple of beautiful island preservation regions (and not-so beautiful resorts with golf courses), and gotten to Amelia island/Fernandino Beach. We had no reservations and just kept checking the roadside for the handful of motels (rather than condos/vacation homes) along the Atlantic shore, but we lucked out and got a coupon rate for the last room in a hotel that is really right across the street from public access to the beach! We were very happy; after putting our stuff away, we went to a restaurant right across from us, and ate at the bar (clam chowder and excellent onion rings for me; chicken sliders for Mark, and vanilla ice cream for desert for the both of us. Then we quickly shed our electronics, I put my swimsuit on just in case, and we went for a long-ish walk on the beach, looking out at the ocean or down at the shells. It is really beautiful at this beach, and after the downpour this afternoon, it cooled off just enough to make it nice as the sun was going down. I walked in for a little bit before we went back to the hotel room, but I was really not quite up for a swim. It was a long and eventful day, but with a very calming ending! Tomorrow, we can take our time exploring the rest of the island; we have decided to stay all day tomorrow and then another night before heading to Atlanta to see Mark’s brother.)