Trolley Tour and Ghost Tour! So much fun.

After a healthy breakfast in the condo, we headed out pretty early to start our trolley tour.  We ended up riding the entire circuit over the day in order to hear all of the history and stories narrated by the drivers.  We used our paid passes to go to the Old Jail, the Oldest Wooden Schoolhouse, and the Oldest House in Florida.  We also went to the St. Augustine Museum, which is free with a trolley ticket as well as walked around the pedestrian mall called St. George Street.  Lunch was in Casa Maya, a fabulous Mexican restaurant in the old city area off St. George Street.  It was great seeing everything else because now we have our plans for today all set.

We grabbed some Subway subs to take back to the condo around 4:30, rested and napped a little, ate dinner, and then headed back to do the 8 p.m Ghost and Graveyard Tour.  It took us to the Tolomato Cemetery, the Old Drugstore, Potter's Wax Museum, and back to the Old Jail.  The drugstore and wax museum were paid attractions the we decided not to do, so that was a bonus to get there anyway.

Today we will head back to the Trolley to go to Castillo de San Marco and several churches as well as Flagler College and a few other buildings, none of which needed a ticket purchased in advance form the Trolley company.  We are certainly enjoying all of this history.

The old jail

The sheriff said Mark was a bad boy.

Hey, How did I get in jail?

Hence the title, Jail Bird.

Ah, he got a pardon!

The oldest Wooden School House.

Rum Tiki made with rum from the St. Augustine Distillery at Casa Maya for lunch.

Mark was thrilled to see his favorite tequila on the menu.

The gates to the city.  Better be inside at night when the drawbridge was closed.

Oldest House.

We did not see any apparitions in the old cemetery.

Inside the old drug store.

Mark was sure he saw liquid moving in one of these bottles!

Inside the wax museum.  The one on the left was our guide!

Our bus driver.

We are in St. Augustine.

The Kingsley Plantation was an amazing tour.  It's also a National Park, so I got another stamp in my National Park Passport book, which was an unexpected bonus!

They had self-guided audiotours.  We both got what was basically an iPhone with headphones to go to the 16 stations. It was an excellent tour, and there were benches in shady areas to sit and listen at most of the stations.  This plantation was very interesting because the owner, Kingsley, had married a young black woman who was a slave.  He freed her, and she became the mistress of the plantation.  It was weird to think that a former slave woman became a slave owner herself.  Very strange.  She outlived him and continued running the plantation.  He also had three other wives,  but she was the first one and the one always in charge.  The tour took about two hours, and by the time we were done, Mark and I both felt like we had been through an emotional wringer, kind of like what it must feel like to go through Auschwitz.

Then we rode the FERRY!  I had never driven my car on to a ferry, so that was exciting for me.  It was only a five minute ride across the St. John's River, connecting the two sides of A1A, but it was exciting for us. Then we took that all the way into St. Augustine.  It was a lovely drive.

We got to the Welcome Center about 4:50 p.m. and went in to get Trolley Tour tickets for two days and tickets to many other attractions.  If you bundled them the night before, it was a big discount.  Then we went straight to the condo and got settled in.  This two bedroom condo is GORGEOUS!  It's all full of beautiful decor items of shells, lighthouses, beach motif stuff.  It's really delightful. After getting unpacked, we went to dinner at a very cool diner-type place called Ned's Southside Kitchen where I got Fish and Grits!  I have seen shrimp and grits on menus but never fish and grits.  The collard greens and the Tasso Cream Sauce that came with it both had ham in them, but they nicely substituted carrots and a cheese cream sauce instead for me. The fish was fried cod, and the grits were done perfectly. It was amazing and probably a once-in-a-lifetime dinner. Mark got a salmon Caesar salad that he said was also very good.  A little stop at WalMart for some groceries finished that day.

Today we will do the HOHO Trolley and go to Castillo de San Marcos, the big Spanish fort, where I will get the passport stamp I expected to get on this trip.  Tonight we are doing the Ghosts and Graveyard Tour on the trolley at 8 p.m., which should be fun.

Getting my passport stamp at Kingsley Plantation.

Starting the audiotour along the St. John's River.

Looking up at the main house with the kitchen attached.

About two dozen remnants of slave quarters are in a semi -circle.  They were made of Tabby construction, oyster shells and sand and other things. They were very labor intensive to build.  Each had two rooms, a main room with a fireplace for living and a smaller room for sleeping.  Each slave had a 1/4 acre plot to grow vegetables for his family.  This was a cotton plantation, but those fields are all just overgrown again with trees and nature.  

Driving on to the ferry.

Buying our tickets at the Trolley Tour Welcome Center.

Enjoying a minute on the porch of the Welcome Center.

Living room, dining room, and a little bit of the kitchen in  the condo.  It's all beautifully done in a beach motif, 

With my fish and grits!

Leaving Amelia Island. Heading for St. Augustine.

We did, indeed, eat Subway for dinner and lunch.  We both agreed that we felt so much better when we ate far less and far healthier.  I logged my calories for the first time in a few days, and I ate 1603 calories.  That's about 130 over my allotment, but I'm sure I was THOUSANDS of calories over the last three days.  lol  It's an estimate anyway because I did eat the Key Lime pie for dessert last night, and I could only estimate how many calories that had in it.

We truly enjoyed Fort Clinch State Park.  The fort has a wonderful visitor center and was lovingly restored in the early 1940s by the CCC.  Now it has costumed volunteers giving wonderful demonstrations on the weekends.  We didn't see that, but there is a movie in the Visitor Center showing all of that.  There was one costumed Union soldier wandering around for conversation with guests, which was kind of fun.  There was never a battle held there, but the history is fascinating.

Then we went to Subway for lunch and brought the dinner back to the hotel.  Our plan was to lounge out on the beach all afternoon, but Mother Nature said NO!  A big storm came rolling through within minutes of us getting to the hotel.  In fact, we could see it starting from Subway.  Instead, we read our books in the comfy chairs under a covered porch by the pool.  When the storm was over, it was too late to go out on the beach because the hotel had already brought in all of its chairs and umbrellas, but we walked on the beach and picked up some pretty shells for awhile before spending the evening watching TV and eating our Subway dinner in the room.

Today we are heading south to Kingsley Plantation on the next island down and then following A1A the whole way down to St. Augustine where we will check into a 2 bedroom condo for the next four nights.  Mark and I are truly enjoying our Florida vacation so far.

Mark is always interested in the old kitchens.

View from up on the ramparts.  The grid on the ground was the foundation for Officers Quarters that were never built.  Officers lived in town.  Not even half of the number of cannons planned for this fort ever arrived to be installed.  There was never a battle here.

View of the Atlantic Ocean from the rampart.  The cannon is facing the deep water channel leading into the harbor of Fernandina.  That was what the fort was supposed to protect.  During the Civil War, the Union army held the fort to keep Confederates from running supplies in and out of FL and GA, but there was never an actual fight.

After lunch, we walked out to the beach.  This is how it looked facing the ocean.

And THIS is how it looked when I turned around!  Do you think he knows what's coming?

He's reading The Boys in the Boat.

I'm reading Princess Bride.

And he also napped.  lol

On the beach after the storm.

View from the hotel's fourth floor roof top deck.

The Bad Idea Bear is following us.

Avenue Q, if you saw it, you will get that reference.

This morning Mark woke up with sky high sugar numbers, and I have an aching back and can't fit my fancy new ring on my finger.  We have apparently been trying to kill ourselves for two straight days.  That's what the Bad Idea Bear does!  He gets in your head and says, "You're not going to eat a huge dinner and have a second drink?  That makes me sad."  And then you do it.

We had a wonderful boat tour all the way up Amelia Island, across the channel, and all the way up Cumberland Island in Georgia.  It was a lot of history and beauty.  Loved it.  That was followed by a fabulous fried grouper fingers, hush puppies, cole slaw, and fries lunch at the historic Marina Restaurant across the street from the Welcome Center.  Delicious and great history and decor.  As we walked back to the car to go to the museum, the Bad Idea Bear jumped in and said, "You're not going in to the ice cream shop?  That makes me sad."  So I went in to the Coffee Shop/Ice Cream shop where they sold Blue Bell, our favorite brand from Brenham TX, and ordered two scoops in a cup: coffee and salted caramel.  So yummy!

Then we enjoyed the Amelia Island History Museum, reading everything in there for two hours.  We learned some new things. It reinforced the history from both the trolley tour and the boat tour.  Then the Bad Idea Bear took us to the Palace Saloon for Happy Hour where I had two drinks followed by walking down the block to the Salty Pelican for a HUGE dinner.  Mark knew they had Ahi Tuna nachos, so he had them and a grilled salmon on a salad.  Both were monstrously huge, and he ate it all except for the last pieces of his lettuce.  I had onion rings, to which I added a lot of salt and pepper, for my appetizer and then a Cajun veggie pasta with grilled salmon.  It came with garlic bread, too.  I ate almost all of it.  I NEVER leave food behind, but this time I only ate a few bites of the garlic bread and actually left some pasta and salmon on the plate.  I was so stuffed I asked for the Key Lime Pie for  dessert TO GO.  lol

Well, we could both barely walk out of there.  We walked across the street to a bench on the Amelia River, which isn't really a river, and watched the sun go down for awhile, watched the train come past the Welcome Center, and stumbled back to the car for the five minute drive to the hotel.  We barely made it into the room before collapsing in bed to digest like a snake with a gazelle in its belly.  We were "Cheesecake Factoried," our phrase for having eaten so much that you can't do anything but lay around and digest.  UGH.  I never ate the Key Lime pie.

So today we woke up and told the Bad Idea Bear to stay in the hotel!  We are going to eat Subway for lunch AND dinner.  We found out where it is on the island last night.  We will be going to Fort Clinch State Park today to explore, which will involve a lot of walking.  Then the plan is to spend the afternoon on the beach.  After all, we are right on it in this hotel and the chairs and umbrellas are complimentary.

So Mark just got finished davening, and I read him this blog.  Clearly, the Bad Idea Bear is on his shoulder because he just said, "Eat the Key Lime Pie for breakfast!"  Don't think I wasn't considering it

There's our boat waiting for us.  The tour was 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m  It was wonderful.

Pajama Dave was our captain.  He was knowledgeable and hysterically funny!

Shrimp boats at the dock.  Shrimping was the biggest industry here until foreign farm-raised shrimp undercut the price.  Now only about 40 boats still go out.  The big industry here is still the cellulose factory.  Lumber trucks go in and out all day long.

There's the cellulose/paper factory.  The cellulose is used in hundreds of products.  Paper pulp is sent overseas to be made in to paper bags.

Fort Clinch at the north end of the island watched out for the channel into the Amelia River from the Atlantic Ocean.  It never saw a battle. 

Wild horses are all over Cumberland Island, GA.  Here's just one of the many we saw today.  They are completely wild and unattended by any humans.  They are the most direct line from the original Spanish horses that were brought here.

Enjoying the boat ride.

After the boat ride, we mailed in our absentee ballots for the primary election.  That felt so good!

Outside the historic Marina Restaurant for lunch.

Can you see the Bad Idea Bear hovering over my shoulder telling me to eat this ice cream?

Inside the Palace Saloon, oldest bar in Florida.  Great ceiling tiles!

Whiskey at the mahogany bar.

Pinnacle cherry vodka and tonic water for me for my first drink.  Then the Bad Idea Bear, kind of named Mark, said, "I thought you were going to order the Pirate's Punch that this place is famous for?"  So, I said, "Hey, that's right.  I"ll have that for my second drink."

Pirate's Punch came in a souvenir cup!  lol

This adorable puppy was right next to us in the bar.

Entrance to the Salty Pelican, which has sunset views!

Mark and his Ahi Tuna nachos. Big enough for four, but he ate it all!  Good boy!

Sunset from the pier.

Pier selfie of two bloated, sick-feeling people from dinner.  We are still not sure how we managed to walk over here and then back to the car!  And it wasn't far either.

All the trees along Centre Street were lit up with little lights, just like Disney World.  Magical.