Florida Georgia Line

The title is a pun because it's actually the name of a country band. I know this because I was a dance instructor. That is the only reason I know this. Also, jokes are funny when you explain them. 

Saying goodbye to these wonderful people was rough. They are some of the best people I've ever met, and I enjoyed their company so, so much, but it was very hard to leave Obelia, especially, who became extraordinarily grumpy that I was leaving and refused to be in the photos to say goodbye. The girls were so sweet and let me sleep in quite late this morning, and watch Daniel Tiger with them for a while. Obelia fixed my broken leg with magic from her Harry Potter book (thank goodness, because the regular smelling flowers and rubbing a fake milk carton on it wasn't working), and Avonlie sang many songs for me; some in English and some in a made up language. 

I had a few hours before I was meant to meet Rachelle at her hotel. She was delayed by 6 hours last night and got in around 6 am. Luckily they gave her until 3 pm to check out today, so that gave me the whole day to get to her. So I decided to stop at Jekyll Island, because it got amazing reviews online. 

Which, I mean, given my experience, is not untrue. 

The pathway to the ocean. I get really excited about the ocean. I got really excited right now. 

This place is so intense. It's like a freaking elephant graveyard. This branch does not do it justice. See pictures below for a more accurate representation. 

I should have asked someone to take my photo. I'm going to start having other people do this for me. I'm not so awesome at the selfies.

See what I mean? Elephant graveyard.

These were really bizarre rocks. The shells had solidified into them. 

So many, many miles of driftwood. Mom asked if it was driftwood or just dead trees, and the beach is called Driftwood Beach, so I assume they are driftwood, but they definitely grow on the island. 

I love the beach in this area. The water is like bathwater and the sand is super fine and doesn't burn your feet when you walk on it. So much better than up north. 

I was successful at picking up Rachelle in Jacksonville, thank goodness. We headed straight for St Augustine, where a lucky thing happened. We were a bit before 5 pm, so we decided to wait until 5 pm to get a discounted ticket rate because it was 1/3rd the price. We took some photos on and on my way back, I was waiting at the machine to pay when a car that was pulling out said, "Hey, do you want a parking pass for the day?" to the guy in front of me, who said, "Oh darn, I already paid for it," to which I responded, "I haven't!" And that's the story of how I got out of paying $15 and then $5 for a parking pass today in downtown historic St Augustine. 

I don't know what this guy had to say, but I sure was willing to listen. (Hey! Now I have someone to take my photo!)

This was inside the drugstore, where there was also a man in a lab coat, thick glasses, and a bowtie. 

Ooooo, looking, weird old-timey measuring devices! This was also a wax museum, but that wasn't something we were interested in. 

So I have heard that this is the oldest city in America, which is strange to think about, because I usually associate everything old in New England, but it makes sense when you think about it. But neither of us really knew what to expect. Rachelle knew it was haunted, which is why she requested to go here. I knew nothing about it, so I said sure. Mostly we wanted to do a ghost tour. Turns out it's the sweetest little town in all of America. 

Look! It's the oldest schoolhouse in America! 

Look! It's the actual oldest schoolhouse in America! 

What the ...   Creeper. 

Every little street was so freakin' quaint and just lined with little shops and restaurants.

A pottery place which we did not make it into, sadly, but maybe tomorrow morning. 

We almost ate here. 

This is the plaque for the house below. 

Seriously, every building is hundreds and hundreds of years old, even if they're just like candy shops now. It's kind of amazing. They did the right thing preserving this for the tourists. I don't know of any other town in America preserved this well. 

This is the plaque for the house pictured below. 

And here are some petrified alligator skulls. Pretty fun. 

And here are some weird mermen. (Julia, look away!)

This is the place we actually decided on having dinner and we did not make the wrong decision! 

Look at how pretty it is with the lights. 

White and red sangrias. Mine was not as good as Rachelle's. 

I like the lights in the vines. It was prettier in person.

So they let me mix and match my tacos! WHAT. On the right is a buffalo cauliflower one, and one the left is a fish one. The waitress was kind of crazy and insisted that they were pretty much the spiciest tacos ever (I think she was referring to the cauliflower one), and that if I liked, "really, really" spicy food, like an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10, then I'd be okay. Alright, she did not need to be that concerned. They were like, maybe a 5 at the most. I was not phased in the least. And I was kind of looking forward to the spiciness so I was sad and added their cayenne pepper hot sauce and that had like, literally no spiciness whatsoever. What is wrong with these people.

Rachelle's green goddess salad and blackened fish. She said it was the most delicious salad ever.

Such a pretty little place to sit and have dinner! 

This is actually an interesting story which I learned later in the night. So this wall is made out of sea shells. The idea was that the Spanish made it this way so that anyone who was trying to climb over would cut themselves a bunch on the hard edges of the shells, and since the medical attention back then was not awesome, they would frequently get infected and die. And just in case the shells weren't enough to do that, they'd put manure filled with broken glass at the top, which would really infect anyone and everyone who tried to get over it.

It's ghost tour time! We picked a really good one I think. It wasn't like a whole bunch of stupid, theatrical stories but just real life stories of things that have happened to the tour guide, other tour guides, and actually historically accurate stories. So we were both happy about that. This is the fort in St Augustine, it's called Castillo de San Marcos. 

Here is our tour guide named Stacy, telling us about some weird doctor that took the head of the Native chief after he died. So the chief was going to surrender to the Spanish and as he was going up to the with a white flag of truce, they captured and imprisoned him. He got sick. The doctor that came to examine him was obsessed with skulls. He did some pretty messed up things with them (like scaring his children into behaving by putting them at the foot of the bed with a flickering candle inside), and apparently, he could not cure the Native chief. So they sent the chief up to South Carolina to let him die so it wouldn't be blood on their hands. Doctor goes up there under the guise of being his best pal, cuts off his head at the funeral, places a scarf over it so no one notices, later comes back to steal Native chief's head and takes it back to his house. Seems a little weird right? Well this was all myth until recently they dug up chief's grave and he has no head. Also, definitely was a doctor who lives in this town who had a collection of skulls. 

This is murder bay. Matanzas Bay, to be exact, which apparently means murder.

Some awful man probably holed up two people in the gunpowder room. There were two lovers missing, one jealous General husband, and two human remains found in there hundreds of years later. You do the math. 

These are the city gates. There was a very big and high city wall that went all the way around the city and connected to the fort. There was a drawbridge here, and the man who was a drawbridge keeper had a daughter named Elizabeth. Elizabeth loved to come to work with dad and hung out there all the time, waving at passersby. She was 9 years old when she died of Typhoid Fever. (I guessed tuberculosis, as all I was given as a hint was, "It's starts with a T," and Rachelle, who consistently referred to me as Hermione, due to my aforementioned eagerness on tours.) So dad goes into mourning and doesn't come to work for days. His boss calls him up and says, "hey, come to work," and he says, "no, but my daughter died," and the boss says, "what are you talking about weirdo, I just saw her there this morning, she waved at me." So apparently this is an actual thing and just a few years ago the police got over 300 calls in one summer about a little girl just hanging out by herself at the city gate waving at all the people driving by, you'd better go check it out. The police eventually stopped responding to said calls because it got tedious to go check out a ghost. 

The graveyard. There are some pretty terrible ghost who live here and trip people and are so narcissistic that they insist on being spoken about every tour or they'll pull out your hair or make you fall flat on your face. So anyway. I did learn the origin of several phrases. I guess burying people alive was a real problem back in the day, so they came up with a few ways of preventing this. A man named George came up with a system in which he would tie a string around their toe or their finger and then run it up to the grave where it was attached to a bell. If the person woke up and flailed about (as one might do, finding oneself locked in a coffin), the bell would ring and they could dig them up. Unfortunately, if they were 6 feet under the ground this took some time. So the more wealthy decided to start being buried above ground and to hire someone to watch for the bell to ring at night. They were doing what we call "the graveyard shift," and if the person survived they were "saved by the bell," and if they were seen about town, they were referred to as a "dead ringer." Although that last one confuses me as I've always thought it meant they looked just like someone else. But maybe that does make sense. Like if someone looks just like a person you thought was dead, then you'd assume it was a different person. Okay, I get it now. 

Hey. That baby stone is a foot stone. So they had head stones and foot stones and that marked how tall the person was. Not very tall in this case.

Okay so welcome to the best story of the night. There once was a bishop everyone loved. They wanted to preserve him enough to have a funeral for him at the church because he was so beloved and yadda yadda and I can't remember why they couldn't just have the funeral right away, but they couldn't. So they ordered a block of ice to preserve him, which was stupid because it was June in Florida for crying out loud so it melted right quick. Instead, they sealed him in a metal casket with a glass viewing case and locked him up tight to keep the smell of a soaked, rotting corpse out of the church. So finally funeral day comes and they're all sitting in the church having a nice little funeral or whatever the Catholics call it and everyone starts hearing some hissing. And then popping. And then BAM!!!  Dude explodes. He's been pressure cooking in this sealed casket because there was no where for his gasses to go as he was decomposing and the summer heat got too much. Everyone proceeds to scream their bloody heads off and because they open their mouths to scream, they end up with pieces of rotting corpses in their mouths. So, so awful. Rachelle and I can't stop laughing at this point and everyone is just kind of standing there like, "Hm. Nice story," and we're so horrified we don't know what to do. Anyway, they end up scraping him off the walls and stuff and putting what remains of him in this little house in the back there. Also, a little boy named James lives in this cemetery and everyone sees him all the time. He wears a newsboy cap and suspenders and bow tie. Sad face. 

This is the kissing tree. It's pretty sweet, actually. The middle tree is a palm that the wife who lived in this house planted and the one growing around it is an oak, which the husband who lived in this house planted, and they just grew together like this. End of ghost tour. Sorry the pictures didn't turn out better. My flash wouldn't turn on and as the night went on, I was unable to really get a good shot. 

You know, for all your manly needs. 

Beautiful fountain garden. 

Our hotel! Rachelle loves the tiki torches. (Not really.)

It's so quaint in here, but super tight. The silly girl at the desk didn't know where our room was and she sent us down this tiny, tiny hallway to a dead end and I was like, uh, no, it's not down there. Good lord.

Where we shall breakfast in the morning. Wish us luck. 

On the agenda for tomorrow: the panhandle.