St. Augustine By Foot

Despite my apparent reluctance to take a day off, today I did just that. After twelve consecutive days of cycling covering a little over 1,100 km, today I went nowhere. Well, nowhere on my bike anyway. Instead, I took to the sidewalks of St. Augustine to see what I could see.

I really had no set agenda for the day other than walking. I have to say, after spending so much time on my bicycle lately it was kind of nice to just walk around. Well, it was kind of nice for about 15 minutes after which point I longed to be back on my bike. Walking is SO slow. However, I resisted the urge to retrieve my wheels and continued walking. In total, I estimate I walked about 15 km on the day.

The highlights of the day were the St. Augustine Light Station and St. George Street. The former included a lighthouse which is open to the public – for a fee, of course. I paid the fee and began my self-guided tour which included the lighthouse, the keeper’s house and a few short trails along the way.

Prior to entering the lighthouse there was a sign indicating the presence of wasps at the top. That sign was not to be taken lightly. There wasn’t a just a presence of wasps at the top of the lighthouse, there was a full blown wasp convention going at the top of the lighthouse. Fortunately (and remarkably) they really didn’t want anything to do with the swarms of humans that kept coming up for a visit.

As expected, the view from the top of the lighthouse was excellent – the fact that it was a clear sunny day didn’t hurt matters. Oh, did I mention it was about 28 degrees (82F) again today? Don’t tell Homeland Security, but I just might stay here indefinitely. Or at least until summer!

Travelling by foot certainly limits the number of sites (and sights) that can be seen in a day. I suppose I could’ve taken one of the many trolley tours which passed me by during the day but a long-since destroyed budget also limits the number of activities in which one can actually partake. As such, I kept walking.

On my initial ride into St. Augustine yesterday, I found myself riding on some very non-cycle-friendly side roads of bricks. While I didn’t enjoy them at all on the bike, I thought I would go back and check them out on foot. This was a good decision as this took me to St. George Street – and some subsequent crossroads to St. George Street. This was a very touristy area full of small shops, restaurants, pubs, ice cream vendors, chocolatiers, and so on. Of course, not being a shopper I didn’t go into any of the shops but I liked the casual vibe of the street. I probably wandered around the area for close to an hour.

With the afternoon passing by rather quickly, I decided it was time to return to the hostel. Yes, today was a day off but I also needed to plan for tomorrow’s ride. I have about 220 km to my next destination which means tomorrow will be another one of those in-between days. The big concern is that there really doesn’t seem to be much in-between.

I’ll skip the “Today’s totals” section of this update since I don’t really have any numbers to use. Well, I guess I could include the number of photos taken today: 106. Don’t worry, I didn’t put them all in the photo gallery. But be warned, there are a lot.