We arrived in St Augustine after dark. The city looked magnificent in all of the Christmas lights. In the city park the trees had lights drooping down from the branches. There were pavilions with artists selling their prints and originals. I met a fantastic painter named Charles Dickinson (www.charlesdickinson.net) who does very detailed oil paintings of the scenery in Florida and sells his work in St. Augustine during the Christmas season. He is apparently there whenever the Christmas lights are up.
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| Local painter in St. Augustine |
St Augustine is one of the nicest cities I have ever visited. The city was established in 1565 and is one of the oldest colonies in the United States. The architecture shows this. Everything looks very historic and detailed. The roads are very very thin and getting our van down some of the streets was....iffy.
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| St. Augustine decorated in Christmas lights |
We stopped for a fantastic burger (and abut a gallon of sweet tea for me) after walking through town a bit and then we headed to Anastasia State Park. The other state parks across the US were run on honesty policy and you grabbed a packet, wrote your plate number and the site number then put your money in and just went to an open site. Apparently in Florida it is not really first come first serve but rather reservation only. So we were locked out of the park! Luckily a ranger showed up and let us in and got us a site.
I didn't find anything other than raccoons on a short night walk but we did hear some barred owls calling in the distance. There seem to be a lot of barred owls in Florida this time of year. We hear them almost every night since arriving here.
In the morning I walked the marsh trail that runs along the inner bay of the park. I was very much hoping for a boardwalk or some nice lookouts over the marsh but it was just a trail with cut grass along the shoreline. There were some good views of marsh birds (mostly herons,egrets and cormorants) but the biggest surprise was seeing two dolphins catching their breakfast fish.
I was absolutely frozen after my morning walk because I had underestimated how cold the wind would be coming off the ocean. The sun was out but it was still only about 8 degrees and the wind was BLOWING! I jumped back into bed for about an hour just to be able to stop shivering.
When I was finally all warm after drinking some tea in bed, I bundled up and hiked the nature trail that went through some gorgeous old sand dunes that have grown into mixed wood forests with oaks, magnolias and pines.
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| Nature trail through old sand dunes in Anastasia State Park, Florida |
It was a day of a lot of hiking because after that I hiked the dunes and beach! This habitat is gorgeous and although I didn't see any live reptiles I did find some evidence of reptiles in the area. There were many burrows and even a decent sized snake skin. Unfortunately with the wind it was quite shredded and I can't tell what it was.
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| Walkway to the beach, Anastasia State Park in Florida. |
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| Sane dunes at Anastasia State Park, Florida |
Sunset along the beach brought all of the shorebirds to land and I saw flocks of 100s at various places all along the beach. There were many sandpipers, ruddy turnstones and plovers. It was very sad to have to leave this area. We all wanted to spend more time there but unfortunately the park was booked up for the entire weekend.
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| Sunset through a gap in the dunes, Anastasia State Park |
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