St. Augustine is a city on the northeast coast of Florida. It lays claim to being the oldest city in the U.S., and is known for its Spanish colonial architecture as well as Atlantic Ocean beaches like sandy St. Augustine Beach and tranquil Crescent Beach. Anastasia State Park is a protected wildlife sanctuary. The Castillo de San Marcos is a 17th-century Spanish stone fortress with views of the St. Augustine Inlet. founded in September 1565. For more details see following link about this fascination old town.
Info on St Augustine
We arrived in St Augustine just before midday and collected our tickets for the train ride around the old town and this takes about 1.5 hours. The Driver on our trip had married a woman from Suffolk which he had visited several times and loved the UK, who doesn't.
His commentary on the journey was really excellent and quite humorous at times and it made for a very interesting trip. Unfortunately the earlier sun had disagreed and we reached the end of the trip, we could go round again we decided we were a bit to cold.
The train ride takes in all the important locations and there some beautiful buildings here and it really worth a visit if you can manage it some time. A video of the train ride is linked below.
By this time we were getting hungry but were also wanting to visit the offshore Island and then use the road back to our Hotel alongside the sea. We found a Publix store where they do great sandwiches and then sat in the car park to demolish them. At around 15.00 we headed North passing house after house right by the sea and we wondered how they would survive a really big hurricane and there was a real mixture of old and new house styles and then on the opposite side of the road blocks of mostly new Condos.
we arrived in the town of Sawgrass and there were some lovely housing estates and really attractive shopping malls, if you can say that, and finally arrived back in to the Hotel just before 17.00 and little tired. In the Hotel they provide each evening a convivial hour with free wine or beer and some snacks but we are still a little tired and chose to avoid but in the meantime Noel wanted to read the instruction book on the BMW 530 to understand what all the buttons and icons mean. This car has what they call I-Drive which is an Apple invention which means its to complex and many things are unnecessary and I would not by this car for this reason alone.
We still had some of the excellent Costco chicken left and so with a salad and a glass of Chardonnay , £6.00 for 1.5 litres is pretty good value for money for the wine.
Noel caught up on some blogging for the first couple of days but thought he would leave todays trip until tomorrow morning when less tired and so we are in bed by 9.30 pm no doubt to awake early.