St. Augustine – 3 miles in dinghy, 5 kilometres walked
Our first day back in St. Augustine was wonderful. And I’m happy for it as our initial experience here was on the way south during the insanely busy tourist week of Thanksgiving, and bordering on unpleasant due to the intense crowds. Today, we saw a beautiful side of St. Augustine. But not before a shocking meeting with a local marine canvas maker.
Two side panels of our cockpit enclosure have become yellowed to the point where we can barely see through them. Ana found a small canvas company in St. Augustine, spoke to the owner yesterday, and she asked us to meet her at 9am at the dock after she had met with another customer there. Ana and I have changed these Strataglass panels ourselves in the past, so we had a rough idea of how much the materials cost and time it takes to change them. We expected a cost of around $250, maybe a little more as this was a rush job. She was there shortly after 9 and was very friendly and seemed to know what she was doing. I unrolled the panels for her to see and she said she could have them done by early afternoon. The cost? $800 or $1144 in lowly Canadian funds. We passed. Nearly passed out, actually.
We walked into St. Augustine and began with a slow stroll through a quiet residential neighbourhood south of the centre and found a series of stately mansions, quaint cottages, southern abodes, all nestled into thick tree canopy with that spooky, yet magnificent Spanish moss reaching down like demon fingers. It reminded us much of Charleson. We passed a school yard swarming with uniformed, perpetual-motion children, a quiet and possibly deserted nunnery, several churches, and Ana spotted a thrift shop hidden at the back of a building, where she picked up a sexy, form-fitting, va-va-voom dress and I browsed the terrifying selection of vinyl (listened to a Jim Neighbours album recently?) then found an equally scary horror novel to feast upon during the upcoming long passages.
Our goal for the return trip to Canada is threefold: make it to NYC before the end of April by doing more offshore runs, explore some of the sights and towns we missed along the way, and revisit places we loved. With that, we visited the Hotel Alcazar building (which had been either closed or packed with touristos last time) and admired the incredible architecture of this Spanish colonial masterpiece and the small antique and art shops along the courtyard. We then moved into the town centre and found the Cuban Café & Bakery, which we patronized last time, but was far more peaceful and enjoyable today with just a handful of customers. This place is authentic Cuban – with Cuban staff, Cuban food and Cuban drinks…but, sadly, American prices. We seated ourselves on the deck overlooking the street and enjoyed our two hot coffees and three warm ham croquettes. This is only the second caffeinated coffee I’ve had during the trip, as I choose to ingest that powerful drug only at special moments. The last one was just a couple weeks ago with our friends in the garden of the brilliant coffee shop at Man-O-War Cay. I derive intense enjoyment of good coffee on these rare occasions and do not look back fondly on the many years I was addicted to it and drank it to feed a dependence instead of relishing in the pure pleasure of the bean. Like many other things in life, with scarcity comes great enjoyment.
Ana and I sat for a very long time talking, mostly about our children, and the exponential growth in maturity and life experience they’ve both experienced the past couple of years. It has been so satisfying for us as parents to see them thriving, taking chances, handling problems, enduring difficulties, traveling, meeting new people, and discovering who they are, what they like, and which of the infinite life paths they will blaze. We are so excited to have them both back at home this summer and looking forward to a lot of lengthy and loud evening meals around our dinner table.
We wandered into the hornet nest of the city centre and while it was still busy with tourists, we found a quiet space – a Greek shrine with the story of the extreme challenges faced by the original European settlers, surrounded by a peaceful garden courtyard. After this, Ana browsed a few shops, we had a chat with the bubbly host at a distillery of flavoured whiskeys, and we walked the perimeter of the 17 century Castillo de San Marcos fort, imagining the 12 pound iron balls exploding from the cannons, ripping holes through the thick wood hulls of invading British ships.
After our self-guided walking tour we returned to the boat for a late lunch then I changed the oil and filter of our trusty 54 horsepower Yanmar as it had been the recommended 250 hours since the last one. This process always takes longer than I think it will and it brought me right to sundowner, where I enjoyed a can of PBR in the cockpit as I finished off the last chapter of a novel. Our original plan had been to return to town to partake in the evening festivities of St. Augustine’s Sail Week, but Ana just wasn’t feeling it so I went in by myself with the used oil to deposit it in the used oil collection drum at the marina, and had a quick look at the goings-on in the Sail Week tent. We weren’t missing much besides a mediocre 80’s cover band, $6 drinks, $12 fish sandwiches, and a lot of sailors wearing fancy clothes (i.e. long pants without rips and shirts without skulls, metal band logos, or stains).
We enjoyed a quiet night on the boat.
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