Heimblog

I am on a road trip with undetermined destination (it’s my vacation trip). As such, this blog has become my road trip blog!!!

I would have update yesterday except I hadn’t logged in for so long that I couldn’t remember my password, and this version of Wordpress has a bug where it doesn’t let you reset your password via email, so I had to get Sandra to help me reset the password remotely. (Sandra is at home having her own “vacation away from Eric” vacation.)

Sandra and I are on rotating sleep schedules… we’re on 25 hour days so we slowly rotate around the clock, sometimes waking up at 2pm, sometimes 4am. Recently we’ve been morning people, so this was a good time to take a road trip. But yesterday I got a bit of a late start and headed out the door at 10am. I was going to try to reach some caves near Tallahassee, but it was too far to get to. So instead I drove to St. Augustine, Florida, as it was only a few hours away from home. And I hadn’t been there in decades. And it turns out that wasn’t a big oversight.

This bronze Catholic proves I was in St. Augustine. It is Padre Felix Varela, whom the sign nearby credits as being the “main ideological founder of the Cuban nationality.” That’s pretty good. What else can we tell? Well, this was a short man, and bronze-colored, from the looks of it.

I also visited the nearby fort, which cost $6 and also cost being smirked at by the men taking tickets. I’m not sure what they were smirking at, but I assume it involved me being at a fort alone? Anyway, it was pretty dull. I took some pictures, but they aren’t very exciting. Okay… here’s one…

That looks out onto the courtyard from inside one of the dozen small rooms. Frankly, the most interesting things were: #1, a series of posters, presented by our state representative, which talked about how blacks here at the fort lived free for 50 years… a whole 100 of them… and how Rep. Barney Frank (I think) is dedicated to righting the skewed picture of how all blacks were slaves. That’s very big of him.

The #2 most interesting thing was that there were big roped-off sections of fortress, the second floor, made by the Brits a few hundred years ago while they were occupying it. (It’s an old fort, and got handed off a lot.) You can see cool shit being stored up there, like cannon loaders and cleaners and stuff. Also, gatorade thermoses. Somebody was up there recently and left their thermos. That was more interesting than the limestone walls we were begged not to touch. (I touched them secretly, once. They weren’t all that great anyway.)

I grabbed lunch at a little bar with an outdoor patio and a live singer. I got a Cuban, which tasted correctly Cuban, but not amazing. The weather was getting brisk though and it was nice to have a hot sandwich in the cool breeze and listen to a college kid belt out “Give Me One Reason To Stay Here” at the top of her lungs.

Then it was off to Ripley’s Museum of Lame Crap, which cost more than lunch plus the fort tour combined, and was less interesting than either. Next slide…