Category: Fun stuff

After visiting Kennedy Space Center, it was off to spend a day in the historic part of St. Augustine, FL, the “oldest continuously occupied settlement of European and African-American origin in the United States“.

We spent most of our time wandering along St. George St, a pedestrian only area with lots of neat touristy little shops and restaurants.

At the St Photios Greek Orthodox Shrine you can find out about the first colony of Greeks that came over in the late 1700s

At the end of the street we stopped in to visit the Cathedral Basilica of St Augustine

There’s a sundial on the cathedral tower, but the indicated time was about an hour ahead of what my watch said. Not sure what the proper correction is for it. The website for the cathedral doesn’t mention the sundial at all.

After that we walked over to the Castillo de San Marcos. It’s a pretty cool stone fort used by the Spanish, British and Americans. Lots of history and well worth the visit to learn about the history of the area, the fort and for the views.

On the way back from the cruise, the first stop we made was at Kennedy Space Center. At the last visit there back in August, we upgraded to the annual pass (which you can do for an extra $5 or something like that with your regular admission). I’ve visited KSC before, but it’s always a fun place to go back to. This time we got to use our annual pass, which also includes free parking (apparently they started charging for parking not long after our last visit). Totally worth the price of the upgrade.

The main entrance has changed quite a bit since the August visit, and there looked to be a lot of progress made on the new exhibit building for the Space Shuttle Atlantis (which I was told is supposed to be opening in July now). There’s a new building for purchasing tickets, and some automated ticketing kiosks. With our annual pass card, we just walked up to the turnstile, scanned our cards and walked right in. Easy peasy.

Inside was mostly the same, although there were a few new things. We only planned to spend a couple hours there so we skipped the bus tour this time. The rocket garden is one of my favourite places to wander around.

Spent some time at the Astronaut Memorial. I love how quiet it is there.

New this visit were these ST:TNG LCARS panels decorating the side of one of the buildings. A neat and fun surprise.

We’ll probably go back again in February either on the way to or coming back from the Orlando Hamcation.