St. Augustine

St. Augustine, Florida is the oldest city in America.  It was founded by Spanish explorers in 1565 and has been occupied continuously ever since.  We wanted to learn us some St. Augustine history, so we parked our pickup truck, paid for rides on the St. Augustine Trolley Tour, and climbed aboard.

Our driver/tour narrator sounded like Stephen Hawking's computer-generated voice, but with less animation and personality.  It was difficult to understand what he was saying, and we quickly regretted our tour choice, but we had to complete the circuit in order to return to our vehicle.  So we rode around for an hour and a half without receiving much useful information.  There were a number of interesting historical sites on the ride available to us if we had dismounted, but we remained aboard; the seats were uncomfortable and we simply wanted to get back to our pickup truck as soon as possible.

So not all our trip experiences have been A-Plus.  A bad one like this reminds us of how much fun the good ones have been.

St. Augustine's old town consists of St. George Street and the surrounding neighborhoods.  Many of the buildings are extremely old.  It's almost strictly a tourist area now but has some charm about it.

We visited the St. Augustine Alligator Farm, which remarkably has been operating continuously for over 120 years.  It's a large facility with oodles of alligators, crocodiles, and related species - hundreds, I'm guessing, of American alligators in large communal compounds, and then individual enclosures for dozens of other species from around the world.

Above are American alligators, enormous and prehistoric as you see them live, who don't seem to value personal space, and below are baby albino American alligators, the same species but with a genetic variation.

We observed feeding time at the old water hole, where chunks of meat were thrown out to the reptiles, and a limited number of dead white rats were offered to those individuals who could launch themselves high enough to snatch them.  Interestingly, there was no fighting even though the gators were almost on top of each other.

There were also marmosets, snakes, a Komodo dragon, and incredibly colorful birds.  This is a fascinating exhibit, and you should visit it the next time you find yourself in St. Augustine.

And so we leave Florida behind after a very nice five-week visit.  The verdict?  Florida is a beautiful state, lush and green, and it has a clean, prosperous look.  I'm a big fan of the palm trees that are so common there. The beaches are gorgeous on both sides, with a small advantage going to those on the Gulf of Mexico.  Housing prices are California-level ridiculous on waterfront sites, but very reasonable inland.  The weather is great in the winter, spring, and fall, but brutal in the summer.  And Florida is flat as can be.  As much as we liked our time here, it's unlikely we'll choose Florida for our golden years.  And that's because we like hills and mountains and a four-season environment, and we're not beach nor golf folk.  But that's just us.  Other people have different priorities and think Florida is perfect, and there's no one right answer for everyone.