Day 49 – St. Augustine

Another Sunday.  Wow the weeks seem to be going by quickly.  This actually turned out to be a good day to have a rest day.  The wind has been incessant today.  Tonight, the news is reporting them at sustained 33 mph winds.  It is supposed to calm down tomorrow, but the direction is also supposed to shift more to the south east direction which could end up being brutal.  There is supposed to be two inches of rain tonight and that also is supposed to change to a 30% chance tomorrow morning.  I am hoping for the best.

We are staying in the Pirate’s Haus hostel.  It is by far the best hostel we have stayed in thus far.  It is clean and the beds are regular mattresses and the owner is just a really fun guy.  He cooked us pancakes for breakfast today and he would make these pirate faces with a squirt bottle of pancake batter and then after that cooked for a bit, he would pour a pancake over the pirate face.  When the pancake was done, you would have this little pirate face in the pancake.  He would write names and messages in the pancakes, which is not as easy as it sounds, because he has to write backwards on the griddle for it to come out right. After that he dressed in his pirate outfit and was wandering around in that.

I spent the morning getting a little religion in my day.  Technology is pretty wonderful.  The sessions of last week’s conference were on the internet and I was able to watch some that I missed.  I also helped Dave, our tour leader, outfit his new bike.  Yesterday as he was riding, his bike frame cracked and he had to buy a new bike to continue on.  He bought a Surly Long Haul Trucker, but was pretty sad about losing his Canondale.  He was pretty bonded to his bike.  We had to move his fenders, pedals, racks and computer to the new bike and it took us a few hours to get that done.  I then jumped on my bike and did a little touring of the town.  There is a lot of history here, but it really is a pretty small place.  The city has a ton of restaurants and there are a lot of tourists, but I think they come just to hang out and eat.

I had a nice dinner with Tim and Nancy tonight.  We ate at this quaint little place and I had Chicken and Sweet Potato Dumplings with pecan pie for desert.  It was so good.  We just had a great evening talking about each other’s families and lives and such.  They really have become good friends.  It will be interesting to see what happens when this is all over.  I imagine that we will all just go back to our prior lives and that will be that, but I would hope that we could still correspond once in a while.

An old Spanish Fort that actually has a mote around it.  It was built in the early 1700's.  Can you belive it still exists?  That's amazing.

An old hotel that is now a university.