There was so much to see and do in St Augustine, I split it up into two blogs. Here’s part 2.

The drawbridge is named the Lion Bridge. We rode our bikes across it and it went up while we were on it.  That was kind of neat.

Why did we cross The Lion Bridge?  To get to the other side silly.

On the other side was the St. Augustine Lighthouse. It is 165′ tall. The tallest is just down the coast and only a few inches higher. You may visit it by climbing the 219 steps to the top. It has a first order Fresnel lense in it.  The lenses come in different sizes called orders.  In the US they go from one to six.  First order lenses are the biggest and can be 12′ high and 6 ” wide. The St Augustine lens is 9 feet tall.   It was built between 1871 and lit in October 1879. Today it is privately owned by the Jr. Service League of St Augustine who are responsible for the beautiful restoration job.

Did you know that all light houses are painted with a different color and design so the sailors knew where they were just by the color and design of the light house.  They also have different signal patterns at night for the same reason.

The lighthouse offered information about boat building in the era that the lighthouse was built.  They have a shop next to the lighthouse that a group of volunteers work to build boats the way they were built back when they used these boats.  They sell raffle tickets and give one away every year.

The other part of the lighthouse experience is researching and resurrecting relics from some of the many shipwrecks in the area. The coast line was particularly difficult for ships and many have sunk.  They are working to identify ships and restore the relics they have found. The relics are heavily encrusted in calcification from the ocean.  Most things are not recognizable.  They bring them up being careful to keep immersed in water due to quick deterioration once exposed to air.  They get an X-ray of the item to see what is inside before they start the long process of decalcifying it.  A Cannon can take 5 years of scraping and reverse electrolysis to clean all the calcification off of it.  That takes patience. In the basement of the lighthouse keepers home they house the relics they have found and cleaned.

Castillo De San Marco is the oldest Masonry fort in the US. It is made of a stone containing compressed shells call Coquina. It was started in 1672 and finished in 1695, that’s 25 years.  Wow. They started construction after many destructive raid of the English privateer Robert Searles. In 1702 the English attack during Queen Ann’s war in an effort to take St Augustine.  1500 residents and soldiers moved inside the fort while they were attacked for 2 months. The smaller English cannons were no match for the stone.  It was so soft the cannon balls would stick in the soft Coquina stone.  The siege was broken when Spanish ships came to help from Cuba.  The fort has never  been breached.

Did you know a Cannon shoots straight and a Mortar shoot up into the air before coming down on it’s target.

 

Those are the highlights of St. Augustine. We could have spent several more days, but did the important stuff.

Thanks for reading.

Karen and Scott

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