After a work week filled with doom and gloom, I was particularly glad to get away for the weekend. It was also nice to be escaping the frigid weather and a weekend forecast of "wintry mix," which means icy nastiness and is pretty much my least favorite sort of weather. The Friday night flight to Jacksonville, Florida was a particularly uncomfortable one, in a fully packed regional jet (my least favorite sort of plane). But it was only an hour and a half. Once there, I picked up a rental car and headed south on I-95 to Saint Augustine.
Why Saint Augustine? About all I knew about it is the claim that it's the oldest city in the U.S.A. - not an entirely accurate claim if you think about, say, Acoma. But it was certainly the earliest European settlement in the country. I'd also once seen it mentioned in a book on "America's best walks." Between that (and the chance to use up the last of the U.S. Air miles), it seemed like a reasonable weekend getaway.
My major tourism was focused on doing the year-round Volksmarch event there. This had been on the Top 10 walks list a few years back and it is definitely a nice route. The walk covered pretty much all of the touristic highlights of the city - starting with the Mission of Nombre de Dios, to the Fountain of Youth, past the old jail and Florida Heritage Museum, the Castillo de San Marcos (i.e. the fort), and the various sites of the historic city center. There are several 17th and 18th century buildings, but the real architectural highlights were built by Henry Flagler towards the end of the 19th century. The former Ponce de Leon Hotel is now Flagler College and it must be odd to be a student living amongst the curious tourists. The Memorial Presbyterian Church (also built by Flagler) is a spectacular fantasy of Moorish arches and stained glass and general magnificence. All in all, it was certainly an interesting walk and a good overview of the area. The final checkpoint is in the visitor center and the woman who stamped my card told me that people doing the walk see more than 90% of the tourists who come there. That's probably true, but sad. It's not like 10 kilometers is all that far a distance.
The only tourist attractions I really spent time at were the grounds of the mission (since the walking route took me through them) and the Fountain of Youth. The latter includes a rather uninformative "discovery globe" presentation, showing the routes of Columbus's and de Leon's voyages. Then there's a planetarium presentation on celestial navigation and various museum exhibits on the local Tumucuan tribe. But the real reason to go is to drink some of the spring water . I'm not convinced it was worth six bucks and I can't say I feel any younger, but one has to do the obligatory tourist stuff.
Aside from that and assorted browsing about the shops and buildings of the old quarter, I also paid a visit to the Whetstone Chocolate Factory. Alas, the factory tour is temporarily closed, but they did have samples and I did buy a couple of truffles. All in all, it was a pretty good excursion and I'd have managed more museum going if the weather had been cooler or wetter. Escaping the ice and snow of Northern Virginia was another highlight.
On another note, I have an entirely silly and useless project to keep track of all the snail mail I get. Should anybody else be as absurdly compulsively curious as I am, here's the January list.
Copyright 2005 Miriam H. Nadel