St. Augustine Lighthouse

This blog was almost abandoned, but I'm resurrecting it for now! In over two decades of living in Florida and countless visits to St. Augustine, starting with school field trips and then trips on my own, I had never been to the St. Augustine Lighthouse. Visible from downtown, the St. Augustine Light is located on Anastasia Island and was built in 1874.

One of the fascinating parts of lighthouses to me is always the design of the stairs leading to the top. There seems to be a lot of variation from lighthouse to lighthouse. Some, like the Ponce Inlet lighthouse have staircases that spiral around the walls of the building all the way to the top. Others like the Cape Florida Light in Key Biscayne have variations on the spiral staircases, only based around a central column rather than attached to the walls. On the St. Augustine Light, the stairs spiraled up around half the building, with landings on the other half. I don't ever remember being in a lighthouse with a staircase designed quite like this.

Once the stairs were all climbed, there was a nice view of the top of the lighthouse from the balcony just below.

There were rather impressive and decorative braces holding up the observation platform.

 

View of downtown St. Augustine.

The lighthouse made some nifty looking shadows on the beach.

I liked this house under the lighthouse!

Clearwater Sunset

STS-133

The final launch of Space Shuttle Discovery as seen from Port Canaveral...

Coral Castle

A few months ago I visited the Coral Castle while down in South Florida. It's a really interesting place where a large structure was constructed using locally quarried rock, supposedly by a single man. The short version of the story goes that a man named Edward Leedskalnin was set to get married. He ended up being ditched, and moved to Florida to build a stone tribute to win back his long lost love.

Multiply that admission price by 100 to get closer to the current admission.

The most recognizable scene from Coral Castle are these giant carvings of various astronomical bodies (or astrological, depending on what the tour guide says).


Edward Leedskalnin must have had a thing for astronomy with his moons and planets. He also built what is now being called a telescope. If I remember correctly, it points to Polaris.

And a working sundial. It was just after 3 when I took the picture.

The original name of the Coral Castle was Rock Gate Park. This is the namesake rock gate. The large rock was originally so perfectly balanced on it's pivot that it could easily be spun. Eventually it stopped working and the group of civil engineers that came to fix the gate were 'baffled' at it's workings and weren't able to get it to it's previous condition.

There was a well which also served as a refrigerator.

An oven out of car parts.

Seminole County Fair 2010

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Ice Skating @ Light Up UCF

I had forgotten how much fun ice skating is! I find all of the outdoor ice skating rinks that pop up every winter all over Central Florida to be kind of funny. It's typically too warm for the ice to stay properly frozen, so there ends up being a puddle of water on half the rink. For example, this was the case at the rink set up at the University of Central Florida seen in the video below:

STS-128

Space Shuttle Discovery launch as seen from Titusville!

Sanford 4th of July

For this year's 4th of July, I headed over to Downtown Sanford to see the fireworks. I really like the location on Lake Monroe, and the event has definitely grown quite a bit since I last watched the fireworks in Sanford several years ago. It was a good show, although the fireworks over the river in Deland looked much more impressive and went on for several more minutes after Sanford's show had ended.

The Seminole County Fair

I visited the 2009 Seminole County Fair a few weeks ago in the parking lot of the Seminole Towne Center Mall in Sanford, FL. My definition of a county fair must be different than Seminole County's, because I would consider this event a carnival. It needs farm animals to be a fair (besides from a pony)...

Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-119)

Space Shuttle Discovery (STS 119) launched on March 15, 2009 at 7:43 pm. I drove out to Titusville, FL to watch the launch, and it is very nice to be able to hear the noise that the shuttle makes.





As it got darker, the contrail left by the shuttle started glowing with wonderful colors from the setting sun. Of course, these could have something to do with all of the nasty chemicals that the shuttle spews out in that smoke refracting the light, but it was still nice to look at. In contrast with Titusville's older buildings, this could have provided some great pictures, but I'm not entirely happy with how they came out.



Here's a video of the launch.

Cady Way Trail's Tied Arch Bridge

I've been meaning to go bike riding along the Cady Way Trail for a while now, specifically over the bridge crossing 436, but it seems I never have my bicycle when I'm in the area. Recently, I was riding along Colonial Drive and happened to have a unicycle in the car, so I decided to see how far I could get before dark. I started at Fashion Square Mall, not quite knowing exactly where the trail traveled. I eventually made it to the bridge and made it my turn around point. It ended up being my longest ride ever on a unicycle (just over 8 miles), but I had fun!

The bridge over 436 is a basket-handle tied arch bridge. This basically means it's and arch with the roadway suspended by vertical cables. It's a very nice looking bridge that I would rate near the top of my favorite Central Florida pedestrian bridges.

Here's some of the strangely fascinating engineering details of the bridge...



And the view of the car dealers and fast food restaurants below on 436:

I need to come back with a bicycle and ride along the rest of the trail. From what I saw of Cady Way, it's nowhere as nice as Seminole County's trails, but it's still an interesting ride.