Castillo de San Marcos, St. Augustine, Florida

After leaving the campground in Brunswick, Georgia at 9:30, we stopped at a Flying J to fuel up. The cost of diesel is down to $2.89, almost half what we paid at the beginning of the trip. I have to take my hat off to the oil companies and OPEC for finding a way to cut their oil production costs in half in six months – they must be getting much more efficient getting the oil out of the ground these days! You don’t think there might have been a monopoly and they were just keeping all that profit for themselves before, do you? ;-)

We made one stop on the way down the Florida coast at St. Augustine. The city is the home of Castillo de San Marcos, the oldest masonry fort and best preserved example of a Spanish colonial fortification in the continental United States. Shaped as a hollow square with diamond-shaped bastions, it stands as a memorial to the glory days of the Spanish empire. Completed in 1695, the fort is made from coquina, a limestone found on a nearby island. As you tour the fort you see all the tiny sea shells still intact in the original limestone. It proved to be an excellent material, as the cannon balls were absorbed without doing much damage. In fact it was such an outstanding design that the fort was never breeched in battle, including a 50 day siege by the British in 1702, even though the town of St. Augustine was burned to the ground.

The historic downtown area has a number of cute shops and small cobblestone streets that reminded us of a European city. We did a little window shopping, and then hoofed it back to the trailer and continued our journey to Orlando. Arriving at 4:30, we set up camp and got started on five loads of laundry. The office had just closed and we didn’t have enough quarters, so I went in search of a car wash with a change machine. Unfortunately all the car washes in Orlando use tokens instead of quarters, so after checking my fourth one, I bought groceries at a Target Superstore and got quarters there.

Brian barbecued chicken burgers while we finished the laundry. After dinner the girls watched Desperate Housewives, while Brian and I caught up on email.