Friday, March 9, 2007

Then Tragedy Struck

Good morning all, Chris Here

Another day down. It was a pretty good day overall. We started out from Orlando around 9:00 heading for St. Augustine. It was another lovely day, 68 degrees as we left Orlando. We saw a few signs for Daytona beach and wondered if it was along the way or not. Sure enough, about half way to St. Augustine is Daytona Beach. Mrs. Plested needed a rest stop so we decided to stop in at Daytona just to check it out. Well it so happens that this week is Biker week. So there are thousands and thousands of Bikers here. and they are everywhere in this part of Florida right now. As I type this there are about 20 bikes in the parking lot of the hotel we are staying at.

Anyway, so we stopped at a Bob Evans for an early lunch. The Bob Evans in Daytona just happens to be right across from the Speed Way. So we have a few great pictures of that. We had a simple meal there, but it was pretty good. Then we took off down to the beach. We drove up the coast towards St. Augustine stopping along the way to get some nice pictures of the ocean and the beaches. All the while bikers were everywhere.

We pulled into St. Augustine around 2:00. found a hotel quickly since there were so many people around. We ended up at a Howard Johnson Express. It turned out to be a great choice as one of the trolley tours goes right through the parking lot.

So we unpacked our stuff and decided to go on said tour so we could get a feel for the city before we started wandering around. Little did we know that this would be the best part of our time in St. Augustine. The Tour lasted about an hour taking us all around the historic district of the town. We saw the Fountain of youth, the Fort, several old Churches and Hotels ect. All in all a great tour and we did actually learn about the town while on it.

Once we were done with that we walked over to the Fountain of Youth(about a 2 minute walk from our hotel) For the bargain price of $7 each we got to see the fountain and have a glass of the water from it. And let me tell you, it wasn't worth the $7 or even the 2 cents the paper cup was worth. It was a smelly glass of stagnant water and the "attractions" they have build up around the place are lame. The only cool thing about the place was the 20 or so Peacocks wandering around. There were three or four pure White ones. We have several pictures of them as well(pictures should be posted by tomorrow, )

So we spent about 30 minutes there and that was plenty. We came back to the hotel and washed out the bad taste in our mouths with good spring water. We then decided to go downtown to the shopping district and find somewhere nice for dinner. We walked through all the little shops and it is very cute. Think Niagara on the Lake or Port Perry or a much bigger Port Carling. We then tried to find somewhere to eat. We walked through the whole historic district and really didn't find anything worth going into(that would cost less then $200) so we ended up at a pub called Scarlet O'Hara's. The driver on our tour said it was a pretty good place. I had the seafood platter(bunch of fried seafood) and Vic had the Southern Fried Chicken. The only thing I would suggest having again from my meal was the Crab Cake and the only thing Victoria suggests from her meal was the drink she had, it has Cranberry Juice, Lime Juice, and Southern Comfort. So overall, this meal is in a distant last place so far on this trip.

After dinner we decided to go on a ghost walk of the area. We had looked this up before hand and it looked cool. It started at 8:30 and lasted for an hour and a half. The best thing I can say about it was that we got some exercise out of it. LOL Our tour guide has just started doing this job 2 months ago and hasn't memorized all of her lines yet. All she was doing was trying to regergitate lines, and the one that we found quite funny is in every story she told, at some point in the story, Tragedy would strike. Hence the title of todays entry. ;)
Vic thinks she was drunk, and proceeded to tell half the people on the tour with us this. It's possible she was, probably more the fact that she was nervous and just not used to the job yet. But since this is the type of thing that is only good if your guide is good, it was a terrible ghost walk(other then the one picture we got of the "orbs" which we will post tomorrow)

By the time we got home we were exhausted and fell asleep pretty quickly. Before we did though we decided we had seen enough of St. Augustine and would be moving on in the morning.

So we are off to new adventure god knows where. talk to you again on the other side

Chris and Victoria

1 comment:

Sid Plested said...

Hey, kids. Sad that the ghost walk didn't work out! I took a great Jack the Ripper walk in London a few years ago, but again, the guide was really good, and I can see what a difference that would make.