Thurs - Friday, Feb 27 Palm Coast to St. Augustine

In which we return to explore the city we missed on our southward journey and are frustrated in our attempts to take a tour.

We had a shortish cruise from the lovely Palm Coast Marina to pick up a mooring ball in the St. Augustine municipal marina.  When we came through St. Augustine in early February it was very cold and we promised ourselves to return and really explore this historic city.   The cruise was uneventful and we picked up the mooring ball on the first try.   Now you land lubbers won't truly understand the finesse that it takes to grab the mooring line from a bobbing boat, but we take it as a sign that we are getting better at this boating thing that we were able to cruise right up to the ball, reach out with the boat hook and attach our two lines.   Below a picture of what it would look like if you took a picture of the boat on the ball...this is not our boat.



Here is a picture of Blue Horizon on a mooring ball at Carolina Beach (an earlier mooring).


Anyway, we made it to St. Augustine and took the shuttle boat in to check in with the Harbormaster and then take a walk. Our goal, since our previous stop, was to take a tour of Flagler College.  As you'll remember from our previous entry, Rick got very interested in the history of Florida and specifically of Henry Flagler who was basically the father of Florida.

In brief, after making lots of money as a partner with John D. Rockefeller in Standard Oil,  Henry Flagler took a vacation in St. Augustine.  He fell in love with the city and decided to build a hotel.  The result was the splendid 504 room Ponce de Leon Hotel.  He soon realized that he could boost traffic to the hotel if he built a better railroad to bring guests to the hotel.  That started him on the next phase of his life...building hotels and railroad lines down the east coast of Florida.   St. Augustine,  followed by Palm Beach, Miami and ultimately a railroad line all the way down to Key West.  If you're interested there is a great book called "Last Train to Paradise", by Les Standiford, that gives a very good high level history of Flagler and all he built.

The Ponce de Leon Hotel is now Flagler College and we wanted to take a tour.
But is was not to be.  Flagler College does not sell tickets on line so we went to buy tickets in person.  The ticket window closes at 4 pm.  No problem we can come back tomorrow morning.  There are tours at 10 am and 2 pm.   We arrived at 10:10 am, but no, the ticket window is closed when there is a tour on (it seems that the person selling the ticket also gives the tour).   No problem, we'll come back in an hour...oops, sold out.  So no tour.  We were very frustrated as you can imagine.   We expressed our frustration to the students working at the ticket booth and said it was "too bad that they didn't teach business at Flagler College".  They replied that "it was the biggest major at the school"...I won't tell you how we responded...



 
St. Augustine is a lovely city with lots of history and interesting architecture.  On Friday morning we had a wonderful breakfast at the Blue Hen cafe.  Great omelette and Melanie had wonderful biscuits and gravy.  For a woman without a gallbladder she is sure adventurous!

Since we would not be touring Flagler College we took a self guided tour of the fort - the Castillo de San Marcos.  This is the oldest masonry fort in the continental US.



As we walked along the streets we saw this sign and felt happy and relieved knowing we were safe.


We ended the day at our "regular" spot (okay, we went twice).  The A1A Brewery has a happy hour with a wonderful artichoke dip.  We ordered it and had a drink before catching the shuttle boat back to the waiting Blue Horizon...an overall nice day even if we didn't get our tour!