Late on the morning of December 20 I picked up a rental car at the Sarasota airport. After a lunch at Panera, I headed out for St.Augustine, FL, to visit my Kenyon friend Eric Allemano and his family. The drive should have taken about 5 hours but was longer because of a bad accident in Orlando. As a result, it was dark when I arrived, but with good luck I easily found Mrs. Allemano's home. Eric and his brother Ralph had already flown in from Europe. They and their mother, Irene, were there to greet me, and fed me a good dinner.
It fell to Ralph to put up the tree, as Eric and I left to tour the sights the only full day that I was there. The family has managed to keep a large collection of ornaments, many of them old, in spite of many moves. We were all glad to help put them on the tree.
On Wednesday I had lunch with Eric at a restaurant on the beach. I then drove back to Sarasota in time for dinner with my family.
Eric and I toured the city of St. Augustine on Tuesday. It is understood to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the country. The first settlement was French, but the Spanish took over after a battle. They buillt a settlement and a fort intended to protect the shipping lanes for treasure ships returning to Spain. The city was later English for quite a while -- note the Episcopal church facing off against the Catholic one across the old central plaza.
We walked down the main street of the old part of the city. It now has shops meant for tourists, but Eric said that he remembered when it was the central shopping area for local people. Some of the buildings are restored houses from various periods, and the rest are modern but designed as reproductions of old houses. We soon decided that it was time for lunch and had a good meal at a restaurant that Irene had recommended. We then toured Flagler's original luxury hotel in Florida, which is now a college. By then it was well into the afternoon, and we went off to see the Spanish fort. The current fort was built in the late 1600's, and the design is the same as what one would see from the same period in France.
Eric and a historic Spanish mortar. There were any number of cannons in the fort with inscriptions telling where in Spain they were made and the King who had ordered them to be built.
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