Saint Augustine, Florida

We spent a night at a B&B in St. Augustine...... a wonderfully restored 1920 Craftsman-style home, filled with vintage furniture and lamps and a four-poster bed that was so high that we used a little staircase-stool to get up into it.                                                                                                               

The homes in this particular neighborhood were all vintage, surrounded by small gardens filled with plants and flowers--- no need for a lawn mower there because there wasn't any grass to cut, and I'm sure the homeowners planned it that way. Each garden was different, with over-grown plants and flowers that took up just enough of the ground to leave room for statues and cute-sy garden ornaments.

There was even a privately owned very small bookshop around the corner from the B&B...... I could have spent a few hours in there, just looking at all the shelves and talking with the two ladies who owned the shop.  So nice to see a surviving bookshop that hasn't been swallowed up by the Barnes & Nobles of the world.

We walked around the back-in-time streets, had dinner by the waterfront at O.C. White's restaurant (O.C. stands for 'out of control)..... delicious seafood and very good service.  We drove to Anastasia Island to see the lighthouse there...... saw The Fountain of Youth park, but didn't go all the way into it because it was just so very hot that day.  We drove over the Bridge of Lions....... didn't get out to pat the lions on the head (a must-do for tourists, we heard). 

Lots of cute little shops in St. Augustine, but so many of them were similar to other tourist-towns that we didn't spend too much time in any of them. Wherever you walk in St. Augustine, you had to be careful of the lizards.... all over the grass and the sidewalks.... little ones, bigger ones.... we tried not to step on any of them.  A nice little town, but very tourist-y......... been there, seen most of it, and probably won't go back.