Budweiser, St. Augustine - Yr 1, Day 209

St. Augustine, FL

We started off the day arriving at the Jacksonville Budweiser Brewery at 10:00 am for a self-guided tour.  Generous free samples when we arrived.  Surely, it was 5:00 somewhere, right? :)

We then hit the road and drove about an hour to St. Augustine.  We needed to stop at the campground we would have stayed at because I had a package of mail and medicine shipped there.  They were nice enough to hold it for us.  The office opened at 2 and we arrived around 12:30, so we drove around until we found a place to eat.  We ended up at Carrabas.  We still arrived about 15 minutes early.  We then drove to the hotel (HoJos) and arrived 45 mins. early.  They would not give us an early check-in so we waited in the car.

After checking in, we all rested for about an hour and then went into the Old City.  They are currently running a "Nights of Lights" so all the buildings and surroundings are lit up.  Very pretty.  I will post photos in a few days.  Mostly we stayed in the Colonial Quarter which is very old and quaint with a lot of gift shops, restaurants and pubs.  I'm sure it takes on a whole different life at night.  I understand that during the day there is a tour with a lot of re-enactments.  We found a gourmet popcorn place and a crystal shop (I bought a cheap memento to put on the bedroom shelf).  Fred bought a t-shirt.  We had dinner in a Spanish restaurant where I had a delicious portobello mushroom and some great sangria.

Tomorrow we plan to take a trolley tour and visit some of the old sites such as the jail, old schoolhouse and Castilo de San Marcos (the oldest fort in the US), the Fountain of Youth, and hopefully return to the Colonial Quarter and the Pirates Museum.  There's a lot to do, so we will meet up at about 8:00 in the morning.  Looking forward to it.  So far I am really loving this area!  Such a far different flavor from the other old historical areas we've been to (Charleston, Savannah and Raleigh).