St. Augustine and Cape Canaveral

Arriving in Jacksonville was almost like re-entering the modern world. What we'd seen so far of Florida was quite rural (even Tallahassee had the feel of a small town). Jacksonville had the skyscraper skyline one would expect from a "proper American city". It was getting pretty late, so we checked into our "wonderful motel", called, if memory serves me Economy Inn. I suppose with a name like that, one should expect something optimized for price rather than quality. Correct - the place was a bit of a dump. But hey, it was cheap ;-)

For dinner, we were somewhat uninspired, as we were nackered, so just decided to sort of pick the best restaurant the internet could recommend us in the vicinity - which turned out to be an Italian restaurant called Sorrento. Excellent choice! The food was great - I especially loved the cannolis I had for desert. Yummie.

The next day, we want to push on to St. Augustine as early as possible, so we didn't actually get to visit Jacksonville at all. About an hours drive took us to St. Augustine. St. Augustine is proud to call itself the oldest town/city in the USA - it was founded in 1565 by the Spanish. It was Florida's capital until Tallahassee was made capital in 1824 (due to its more central location in Florida).

Thankfully, St. Augustine has done a pretty good job at keeping its historic heritage intact - not the case in all American cities. The historic centre is quite a few blocks in size, and the architecture has been kept pretty harmonious. It is a bit of a tourist trap though - pretty much all the houses in the old town are either tourist trinket shops, bars, restaurants or hotels. Unavoidable, I suppose.... We started off by wandering around the historic district, checking out the cathedral and the old town hall.

Just outside the old town, there are a couple of architectural follies, dreamed up by Henry Morrison Flagler, the industrialist, oil magnate and railroad pioneer (he built the railroad that connected Miami to the rest of the eastern coast). The first of his "follies" is Flagler College, formerly the Pone de Leon Hotel. In its heyday, it was one of the most luxurious hotels in the world, and yes, we confirm, it's an impressive building, built in the Spanish Renaissance Revival style (ahem, please refer to Wikipedia for more details about this particular style of architecture). We opted against taking the guided tour, but were able to check out the impressive entrance hall anyway.

Across the road stands another architectural folly, the Lightner Museum. This used to be a hotel as well (called Hotel Alcazar), and yes, it was also dreamt up by Flagler. Seems that one luxury hotel wasn't enough. We decided to visit the Lightner museum, which was a good idea. First of all, it allowed us to check out the impressive interior. The museum itself is a bit weird - it's a bit like a collection of odd objects sort of randomly put up on display. It's a bit like I imagine the Smithsonian museum, but here of course on a much smaller scale.

Of course, when one visits St. Augustine, one must also check out the famous fort Castillo de San Marcos - the oldest stone fort in the USA - construction began in 1672. It looks like your average Vauban-style fortification that you find a lot of here in France. It's rather dramatically and strategically located by the Matanzas Bay. It looked pretty stunning, with the late-afternoon sun lighting up the fort... Too late to visit, unfortunately!

It was getting dark, so time to start thinking about dinner! We decided to have an apero at a place called Scarlett O'Hara's (we surely are in the South, eh...?). We ended up selecting a place called Gas Full Service Restaurant. A bit of an odd name for a restaurant - but it was great. The retro interior decoration is very American indeed (in a positive way!), but what's most important is that the food was excellent too. And what a great collection of craft beers ;-).

We stayed at another motel, called Daily Inn this time. It was a bit better than the place where we stayed the night before, but I wouldn't exactly recommend it either. I suppose you get what you pay for...

The next day, it was time for me to fulfil a bit of a lifetime dream. Well, kind of. Of course, when I was a kid, I wanted to go to the moon. So I wasn't going to the moon, but at least I was going to Cape Canaveral (the next best thing?). Cape Canaveral is the place where NASA does all their space launches. Mathilde wasn't all that interested in astronauts and stuff, so decided to drop me off and then head off to a nearby town.

Cape Canaveral is actually a rather big island, and totally deserted, apart from the NASA installations and the visitor centre. Getting in turned out a bit challenging, as there was quite a queue for getting in, and Mathilde dropped me off before the main parking. And when I tried to enter by food, a rather stern guard told me I was only allowed to enter by car. OK, fair enough... Thankfully, a friendly Chinese family were happy to drive me to the parking lot ;-)

I was going to have to be picky with what to see, since the visitor centre is HUGE, and I only had about 3-4 hours to spend. Queuing up for the tickets etc. already took me nearly an hour, so I was starting to wonder whether it was worth it ? I'll kill the suspense straight away, it was worth it...

I started off by taking the bus tour - which took us past several alligators (told you, it's a natural reserve!) to the VAB a.k.a. the Vehicle Assembly Building. That's the place where they assemble all those huge rockets and other vehicles going into space. Needless to say, it's absolutely massive - it measures 160x218x158 meters - I think it's something like the 6th biggest building in the world by volume. So this where the Saturn V rocket was assembled (the one that was used for the Apollo program) - and it's also where the rocket for going to Mars will be assembled (yep, a manned journey is planned for the 2030's, apparently).

The highlight of the bus tour is, without a doubt, the Apollo/Saturn V Center. This is where it actually all happened, this is where the journeys to the moon were controlled (as anybody who's seen Apollo 13 would know, the mission control is located in Houston, Texas - so once the launch is complete, control is handled over to Houston). There were a couple of rooms with interactive videos talking visitors through the Key missions (Apollo 8 mission, when the first successful moon orbit was accomplished by NASA, and of course Apollo 11, when man finally walked on the moon).

But the coolest thing is of course the Saturn V rocket itself. The size of it just beggars belief. What an incredible piece of engineering! Amazing that it worked - and so reliably, too! (mind you, the fact that Apollo 8 was the first flight that established a lunar orbit does sort of tell you there were a few failures too in the early days...)

Back at the visitor centre, I checked out the rocket garden (had to do that!), and also the exhibition about Mars exploration, which was pretty cool too. They managed to get me all excited about going to Mars, at least! 20 years to go...

And then, it was time to go. Was it worth the detour? YES!