20th Anniversary Adventure 2016 - Day 3

When you were learning about famous explorers in elementary school, you probably heard about Ponce de Leon and his quest to discover the Fountain of Youth. Well, folks, today Chad and I drank from the very fountain that Mr. de Leon spent his life searching for, and I must say, it tasted like there may have been a diaper full of hard boiled eggs in the bottom of that fountain.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. After eating breakfast in our room, we checked out of the hotel, drove to St. Augustine’s Historic District, and bought passes for the Old Town Trolley Tour. The trolley provides hop-on, hop-off tours of the city with 23 stops along the way and plenty of history. We spent 8 hours touring the town beginning at the Fountain of Youth Archeaological Park.

Giant oak trees with Spanish moss dangling from the branches lined the entrance to the park, and four peacocks perched in the tree tops were making the loudest, most obnoxious noise I’ve heard since Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign. The park is home to 49 peafowl (I learned that word today) and peanut-filled gumball machines were located all over so visitors could feed the birds. Ponce de Leon may have landed at this place in 1513, giving us 500 years of history to learn in a single day, but I was obsessed with the peafowl. I filled my pockets with peanuts and I think I spent most of our trip money on feeding the animals. Peacocks, squirrels and pigeons flocked to me and I felt like Noah, but I probably looked more like Ace Ventura.

I think his name was Ziggy

I was excited. Sorry.

Chad carefully collecting our only hope for eternal youth

We learned a lot about the Timucuan Indians who inhabited the land before Spain claimed it, and the park Rangers did their best to communicate the historical significance of what we were seeing. But I think I may have ruined the moment when I blurted out, “This peacock just ate a peanut clean out of my hand!” in a southern accent that surprised me as much as it did Chad.

Chad's been arrested!

We spent a couple hours at the Fountain of Youth (of which only about four minutes were spent not feeding animals), and then we headed to Old Town for a tour of Florida’s oldest jail. St. Johns County jail was built by the same company that built Alcatraz, and it was an unsettling but interesting tour. Our guide, Deputy Otis, arrested Chad and put him in the Birdcage, which in old-timey days was a way to publicly humiliate prisoners. They were locked inside the cage for 24 hours and ridiculed by the public. Chad was locked in the cage for two minutes and when Deputy Otis finally set him free, he was delirious and in shock, but still managed to continue the tour.

The trolley tour was fun, informative, and allowed us to get our bearings in “the nation’s oldest permanently occupied European settlement.” We stopped for lunch at an outdoor restaurant called The Backdoor Island Café. We sat under palm trees surrounded by tropical flowers and enjoyed a light lunch before another storm passed through town. We could feel it coming and the far off rumblings of thunder excited us.

The rain hit as we boarded the trolley. Unlike the misty PNW, this rain falls in warm heavy drops that slapped our skin and soaked us through. Our next tour was Flagler College, formerly known at the Hotel Ponce de Leon. It was built by Henry Flagler, co-founder of Standard Oil. The hotel was the first to offer running water and electricity (installed by Thomas Edison), it had electricity before the White House! I guess that’s a big deal because I heard it like, four times today. The tour was fantastic and when it was over, the storm had passed. We bought coffee because, apparently, we are too relaxed on this trip and felt ready for a nap.

Flagler College

We caught the trolley just as another storm rolled in. I used a large unfolded map to shield myself from the rain that blew through the trolley, and I suffered a moment of depression as I thought about the homeless people who were probably doing the same thing, but not enjoying it nearly as much as I was. My sadness was short lived, though, because Chad's new sunglasses broke and we laughed for an hour.

Our final stop was Castillo de San Marcos. Built in the late 1600s, it’s the oldest masonry fort in America, and it has never been conquered. The gun-deck was closed because of the lightning, so we explored the interior of the fort and read about its history. Mostly we made fun of everything we saw becuase that’s what we do when we get...I was going to say when we get tired, but that’s actually just what we do. I overheard a park ranger tell her co-worker that they were opening the gun-deck in 5 minutes. We stood by the stairs that were fenced-off, and the moment they removed the barrier, Chad and I ran to the top. We had the gun-deck to ourselves for two full minutes. For some reason that was a big deal to us and we spent those two minutes celebrating that we were the only people on the gun-deck. We enjoyed the 360 degree view of St. Augustine and the Matanzas River. We imagined what soldiers experienced four centuries ago as they fought off pirates, but the minute that 75 elementary-school children came up the stairs, we were done.

It was now 5:00 and we had no idea where we were going next, so we sat in our air-conditioned car and looked at a map. We picked a place just outside Savannah, about three hours north, and started the drive. A little north of Jacksonville we stopped for dinner at Cracker Barrel, where Chad ate turnip greens that were so gross, I was convinced the cook had scraped the sludge off the bottom of the Fountain of Youth. Everything else was cozy, delicious comfort food and we got back on the road full and happy.

Two hours later, we were settling into a new hotel somewhere outside Savannah, and we can't wait to see what Georgia has for us tomorrow. 

"I couldn't tell you, honey,
I don't know.
Where I'm going
But I got to go.
Cause every turn reveals some other road
And I'm a traveller."
      -Chris Stapleton

-Rachel