Jacksonville - Why???

 Yes, I skipped Norfolk, Virginia. That's because we were there on a Sunday, very few things were open because the interesting stuff shuts down at the end of October, and I picked up the bug that Larry had on Hallowe'en. We were supposed to have gone to Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, but I spent much of the day napping.

The following day was a sea day and I was feeling more myself, so by the time we reached Jacksonville we were ready for our tour to St. Augustine, America's oldest city. You needed to have something to do from Jacksonville's port, because it is literally 25 minutes away from the city, there are no taxis and the shuttle between the ship and city only runs until 2:30 p.m. Ride sharing is available, but can you imagine the Uber premium for a one-way ride from downtown?!! There must be something about no bus traffic into the cruise port after 3:00 p.m., as even the tours had to be back by that time.

So we took the 45 minute ride to St. Augustine, were driven around the small old city with a couple of photo stops and then were let loose on the old downtown - now a compact area streets of shops, restaurants and hotels - for some time for lunch and shopping.

One of our stops was at a building that was originally a hotel, but is now home to St. Augustine's City Hall as well as the Lightner Museum.

The courtyard at the City Hall. Not a bad
place to take a work break!

Our second stop was the fortress, the Castillo de San Marcos. It is a national park, and one of only 3 walled fortresses in North America. The other two - San Juan and Quebec! We didn't have time to go inside for a good look around, so just took some photos from the outside.

During our free time we wandered a little way around town, which is very easily walkable, and found a couple of interesting buildings. We stopped only a block or two short of the most spectacular architecture in the town. The Memorial Presbyterian Church was built in the same style as the cathedral in Florence, and likely dominated the town until the trees all grew up around it. Now we have something to look for the next time we happen to be in St. Augustine.

Instead we found a couple of the other churches:

The Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine

Grace United Methodist Church

The original City Gates.

For our lunch break we found the Prohibition Kitchen - small doorway from St. George Street led us into a huge, two level bar and restaurant, obviously very popular with the locals judging by the stack of paging devices at the welcome desk.

It was a little after noon and already the place was getting busy. We ordered 'burgers' - I had the flounder sandwich and Larry ordered one of their special house burgers, voted the best on the east coast of Florida. After looking at these photos you will understand that we ate a very, very small dinner that night!

My flounder filet was much larger than the bun

Larry's special burger was topped with an egg and
a couple of other things.

When he picked up the top bun, he found that
they even branded that! Apparently only
on the house special burgers, though.

So by 2:00 p.m. we were all back on the bus and driving back to Jaxport. We arrived just before 3:00 so our tour guide was very happy!

We had an overnight stay in Jacksonville - we think that may be because some of the other ports further north like Charleston weren't available and Crystal had to go where they could - with a tour to Amelia Island going out on Wednesday. We opted to stay on board, and were glad we did because the next day had a lot of on and off showers. Our friend Kathy did that tour and reported that it was nice but not spectacular.

We were up at the Sunset Bar for our 6:00 sailout in the darkening evening. The port is a good way up a river and it was very interesting to find and follow the navigation lights as we sailed. It took us until almost 7:00 to reach the Atlantic Ocean.

We crossed this bridge on our tour to
St. Augustine.

 Next stop - Nassau. For us it will be an in-port sea day. With at least 6 other ships, some of them very large, in port with us, there's no point to going anywhere!