St. Augustine and facing my fears

 We went into St. Augustine this morning to see the sights and of course run to Camping World.

 Our first stop since it was lunch time when we arrived was at GAS Full service Restaurant.  This is a very neat local owned restaurant.  They get all their produce and foods locally.

 Love the play on words here.  They give you complimentary devil eggs while you wait for your order and they were delicious.

 This is the owner/manager Lindy!  Take a look at that burger! Yum!!!  Bring a friend to help you eat it.

 They have taken an old gas station and made a very cute diner out of it.

When she allowed art students to have an art show and sale outside her restaurant, the art teacher painted this for her!

 Notice the door handles.  They are gas pump handles!  How cute is that.

 She has this pepper sauce on the tables and also sells it.  This datil pepper is grown mostly in the St. Augustine, Florida area.  This is a fairly new pepper sauce that is smoked.  Smoking the datil pepper helps to tame some of the 225,000 Scoville units. That is nearly 40 times hotter than a jalapeno! 
This old 1953/54? Oldsmobile.  I noticed it in a painting on the wall inside also.

                                                                        Neat huh!

 From there we went to the St. Augustine Lighthouse and museum.

Beautiful prism that magnifies the light.

scale model of the buildings and lighthouse. (the lighthouse is round not square now) The original lighthouse was built in 1737.

 After walking up 219 steps the equivalent of 14 stories, I made it to the top.  I am VERY afraid of heights so this wasn't an easy task for me.  At first I clung to the walls of the lighthouse. I did eventually let go and walk around.

This lighthouse was finished in 1874 and took 3 years and over 1 million bricks to complete.  In the lens room is the original 1st order Fresnel lens still rotating, ready to magnify the 1000 watt bulb into a signal visible 25 miles away.

One more fear conquered, one more time!

 Next we saw the Castillo de San Marcos.  This is the oldest masonry and only extant 17th century fort in North America.

 This remote outpost had almost constant attacks on it during the colonial wars.  (1500-1800)

 Next we went to the Fountain of Youth.  I now look 20 years younger! Haha  We were so tired by this time that we didn't even go inside.  It cost $11.00 to enter and there were a lot of interactive programs to watch to justify the cost (my thinking). All I wanted to do was see the fountain, but it appears that it was more like a water pump now so we decided to skip this one.

 This was the only fountain we saw while here.

And he was our greeter.

We headed back to camp and of course went through another rain storm.  It must have had a lot of wind in it when it hit the campground because limbs were down everywhere.  Buddy was hiding under the steering wheel when we got back.  Poor baby.  He doesn't like storms.

We have seen what we wanted to see in this area so it's time to move on.  We will decide where tonight.  

Later