Road Trip South - St Augustine

A week before thanksgiving we embarked on another road trip.  Since going to Anna Marie island in the summer, we have been absolutely in love with Florida.  After returning fro. Our summer vacation, we hit straight on with booking this. 

We are well practiced in driving to Florida now, so we left at 5.15am, having Krispy Kreme donuts on the road for breakfast.  We did stop at a Denny's for a proper breakfast too! 

We arrived in St Augustine at 1pm.  The weather was very warm, and there were loads of school trips going on.  We took a little drive around before parking at the fort.

This is where we saw our one and only dolphin of the trip.  It is in the background of the photo below.  Typically Oliver is looking the other way.

St Augustine is the oldest settled town in America,  the area having been discovered by Ponce de Leon, as part of Florida, in 1513

It was disputed between the British snd Spanish for a couple of hundred years, before the Spanish sold it to the United States.

The fort, Castillo de San Marco's, was established in 1738.

There are plenty of old cannons along the top

Although there were lots of school trips taking place, we were able to see the fort really well.  The kids really enjoyed it, and it is very reasonably priced.  This is where Isaac discovered the joy of being able to read all the facts and figures in the boards going round.

We spent a good couple of hours at the fort.  We then decided to do a trolley tour of St Augustine.  This is something we have never done with the kids.  We went with the Old Town Trolley Tours.  This gave us a 90 minute tour of the town, where we could hop on and off as we pleased. 

We weren't sure how the kids were going to be on this adventure, but they loved it.  We sat right at the back, so we would not disturb too many people. 

This enabled us to see a lot more too.  This was really informative, and using the map, we were able to get our bearings very quickly. That would have been great, if we had been there for more than one day!

We could have got off at the winery, the chocolate factory, the fountain of youth, the ghost tour.... Except we had the kids, and a limited amount of time. 

We sat out the whole 90 minutes.  It was certainly worth the money.  And I think it helped the kids relax a little after the long drive.  So many things to see! 

You are going to see a running theme in these posts: I wish we'd had more time.  But we have plenty of things to our future bucket list.  I hope to be able to go back to St Augustine, sans kids, and explore it more thoroughly.  I would highly recommend it.  The town is so beautiful, with an expansive history (notice how I have not mentioned that here.....).

Although the Holiday Inn we were staying in that night was on the edge of town, we came back to the main tourist area for dinner at Meehan's Irish pub.  It was delightful, even if it was raining......