3/31 to 4/05

03/31/09 to 4/05/09 From our anchorage, it was only 20 miles or so to the Canaveral Barge Canal, on which we traveled eastward about 4 miles to Harbortown Marina. The Kennedy Space Center is nearby and we visited it the next day for a few hours. Then we headed north by car to St. Augustine. Both couples on Lil’ David have cars for this stretch of the trip and usually one car is left at the current marina and one is moved ahead to where they’ll be in 2 or 3 days. At this point they had fetched Bill and Kathy’s car from Fort Pierce. Lorenzo and Lois’s car was at this marina already, so we set off in 2 cars. In St. Augustine, we found a marina, made reservations for the weekend, and left Lorenzo’s car there, all returning to Harbortown in Bill’s car. (Who’s on first,............) Now it was time to move boats and on Thursday, we went to New Smyrna and docked for the night at the city marina. Actually, because there were no open slips, Lorenzo created his own space and we rafted to him.
On Friday, as we cruised toward St. Augustine, the weather seemed to change every few minutes: rain, sunshine, then wind. The wind endured. At one point, a small boat approached Lil’ David. It turned out to be someone from Lorenzo’s home area who knew him. He was comercially crabbing in the ICW and gave them a batch of freshly caught blue crabs. After we got tied up in St. Augustine, Lois J. cleaned the crabs, floured and fried them briefly, and then made crab gravy to eat over rice. Delicious!
As we were all sitting on the aft deck later after dark, we saw a bright, moving light in the sky. Turned out to be a rocket taking up a satellite.
To get an overview of St. Augustine, the oldest continuously occupied city in the United States, we did a brief trolley tour on Saturday. The driver did a continual commentary and we could get off at any stop, sightsee, and re-board any other trolley when it arrived. Since the tickets were valid for three days, Sunday was more of the same. We got off to walk thru the pedestrian mall, to visit the fort Castillo de San Marcos, the old jail, the museum, and the San Sebastian Winery. It was a great way to get acquainted with the city and its history. The name Henry Flagler (co-founder, with John D. Rockefeller, of Standard Oil) was mentioned numerous times. He built or refurbished many of the bigger buildings in the late 1800's and early 1900's, attracting many wealthy New Yorkers to spend winter vacations in St. Augustine.