Thursday night we spent the night at a Holiday Inn in St. Augustine. It was a dark and stormy night...
But, we woke up to a beautiful, sunny morning, the kind of morning that makes people want to move to Florida. Blaze was very excited about the motel pool and went for his first swim of 2009.
We have been to St. Augustine several times, including our honeymoon, but Friday was the first time we ever visited the Fountain of Youth Archeology Park.
There really is a fountain. It is a mineral spring that does not make you younger, but the natives did seem to have longer life spans than Europeans back in 1513 when Don Juan Ponce de Leon found the fountain.
We chose the perfect day to visit the fountain, because it was on that day, April 3rd, 496 years ago, that Ponce de Leon claimed the continent of La Florida for Spain. He had arrived during the Easter Season, when all the Spring flowers were in bloom, so the name La Florida means " The Land of Flowers".
Tourists are given drinks of the water in little plastic cups, although now the water is filtered.
This cross of stones, next to the fountain, was placed in the ground by Ponce de Leon and his men.
Besides the Fountain of Youth itself, the park contains one of the country's last manually operated planetariums, which showed us what the sky would have looked like when Ponce de Leon was here and explained how the stars were used for navigation.
There are three buildings with guided shows, the Fountain of Youth, the planetarium, and a building that houses a two-story tall globe:
The park is also the site of the first Indian Christian burials in the New World. Although archeologists did uncover the bodies, they were re-buried with a propped Catholic service.
There was a small display that showed and explained local building material:
The near-by Spanish fort and many of the older buildings in St. Augustine were built out of coquina.
This was the building method used for those slave cabins at Kingsley plantation.
These beautiful birds wandered freely all over the grounds. I had never seen albino peacocks before. When their plumage is all fanned out like that, it looks like it's made of lace.
8 comments:
It is days like that that make people move to Florida and a couple of months later it is days like that that make people die of heat stroke. I will stay in my frigid north. You can always wear more clothing to avoid cold, even if you stop being able to put down your arms after a while.
Sour Grapes, huh Ula?
If you can make fun of me for my blizzards while you are already harvesting from your garden I can make fun of you for your summers.
True.
Since the bedroom air conditioner isn't working, I'm sure you'll get to hear from me how uncomfortable Summers here are, too.
The aquifer is 2 states wide...wow. That is amazing.
I just hollered at my Katie to get upstairs and see the photo of the albino peacock. Didn't even know such a bird existed!!!
A chorus of Oooooohhhh's from my girls. lol
Gonna post your photo on my blog with a link to yours if you don't mind. :)
I don't mind at all.
I took so many pictures of those peacocks, but that was my favorite, because it had the male and female together.
We went to St. Augustine 4 spring breaks in a row when I was a kid (also watch spring training ML Baseball). I'm SO jealous you were just there. I really need to take my kids there before they get much older. Thanks for putting it on my list. :)
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