St. Augustine Municipal Marina, FL (docked)
June 15 and 16, 2022
While I have been leading a virtual workshop John has been taking care of more boat tasks. He has purchased more oil for our next oil change and looked at some possible pumps for our dinghy (so we don’t have to bail it out every time it rains). John’s also brought home some great pizza for lunch each day.
We have managed to walk to all four of the St. Augustine breweries – including Old Coast Ales which is on the other side of the Bridge of Lions. We met some folks who had stayed for a week on a catamaran in the Bahamas and it was cool to see that we had enjoyed some of the same places.
There’s a lot of attention to early history of St. Augustine with lots of Spanish architecture and motifs in the old town. Today I found some other eras of history that show how St. Augustine has been an important historical place all along.
After work today I walked south along the ICW and found the St. Augustine National Military Cemetery. The oldest grave is from 1828 and there are remains interred there from wars since then. This area is not in the tourist part of town so it’s serene and quiet there.
There are three pyramids there that contain the remains of soldiers who died in the Florida Wars, a part of history that I had never heard.
I also found Maria Sanchez Lake (in the mid-1700s this was Maria Sanchez Creek but was dammed in the late 1800s) with a path around it in what is known as Lincolnville, which was settled by freedmen after the Civil War. There were even a few markers discussing St. Augustine’s role in the Civil Right Movement.
There’s so much cool history here – there are bricks from Graves Brickyard in Birmingham. Those bricks must have been made between 1901 and 1920. The Reynold’s bricks were made in Tennessee between 1888 and 1939. Imagine all of what these bricks have seen in the last 100-plus years.
Tomorrow we get an early start and head to Fernandina Beach with hopes of staying on a mooring ball. We visited there in January and really liked the area but did not explore much. I bet we can even find a few microbreweries within walking distance of the marina.
Life on Lailia 