Ten days back, a Saturday , at 4 AM, we set off on a one-week vacation to be based out of Orlando. To better use the 8 hours potentially boring drive, we decided to stop at St Augustine which figures in lonely planet's top five in Florida.
We took breakfast at Jacksonville,wanted to check out Jacksonville beach as per a colleague Rathees' suggestion but did not see any directions only to realize ten minutes after leaving Jacksonville that Jax beach refers to Jacksonville.We reached St Augustine around 10 AM.
Completely unplanned - the only information we had with us is that the beach is a nice quiet one and that St. Augustine is the oldest city. There is good scope for some history watching.However, I somehow wanted to still take things slow though there was hardly any time.
Beach : the beach was a clean neat uncrowded one.Niya played in the water and had a great time while Divya managed her and I recorded the time in photos.Then we had a nice walk along the beach.
Two images that had stood out from pre-trip research was a 15th century fort and a lighthouse.GPS took us to the lighthouse which looked like the Thikkoti lighthouse.
We did not climb on it as Divya had not been feeling very well. Also, we had to see the fort before we continue on to Orlando. The slowness took another bite as we had a relaxed sea-food lunch at the conch house restaurant. We had gator tail for starters and I imagined the picture of Niya having the gator nuggets as the diagonal to she meeting the real alligator in the everglades trip to be done later on in the week. The trip was meant to be a cuisine vacation as well, we had Anastasia shrimp pasta and Fish Tacos against the menu.http://www.conch-house.com/Lunch_Menu.pdf.We had a nice lunch but also ate a lot of precious time.
Fort : Next we went to the 15th century fort. I took out the camera and I just moved around where it led. Such camera encounters usually don't end with many good photographs but at the same time the involvement is very fulfilling. Good photos come from a more purposeful approach - the focus being on the result of the photography.
Next, we went to the oldest house museum but that was closed and we rode to kissimee Orlando to our resort.
Resort : The resort was a huge one with 1500+ villas spread across four villages - north,south,east and west. While we waited for check-in formalities, we were reminded of ticket queues in airports.As we drove to our assigned unit, the pale yellow houses in the property looked like government quarters - looked like old villas.Once we reached the unit, the unit struck us a very big one and a very old one at the same time - with 3 CTVs - one in hall and one in each of the two bedrooms. Niya was wonderstruck and she walked around wide-eyed "Endhoru veliya veeda .. ithu nammude puthiya veedano..eththra muriya - ividem muriyundu - nokkachcha(What a big house , how many room ! )" etc.
Divya was exploring the balcony area and shrieked suddenly that a frog jumped on her. Indeed there were frogs around - small green ones mostly. While these struck as a pain on the first day, later we had accepted these as part of the stay as everytime we come back from our day-trip we need to open the door slowly to prevent these frogs from jumping on you and once, one actually jumped on my face as well.
Hunger struck and we bought McChickens and stocked some for tomorrow's breakfast as well.Schedule was to meet Jacob and Minnie at the magic kingdom.
We took breakfast at Jacksonville,wanted to check out Jacksonville beach as per a colleague Rathees' suggestion but did not see any directions only to realize ten minutes after leaving Jacksonville that Jax beach refers to Jacksonville.We reached St Augustine around 10 AM.
Completely unplanned - the only information we had with us is that the beach is a nice quiet one and that St. Augustine is the oldest city. There is good scope for some history watching.However, I somehow wanted to still take things slow though there was hardly any time.
Beach : the beach was a clean neat uncrowded one.Niya played in the water and had a great time while Divya managed her and I recorded the time in photos.Then we had a nice walk along the beach.
Two images that had stood out from pre-trip research was a 15th century fort and a lighthouse.GPS took us to the lighthouse which looked like the Thikkoti lighthouse.
We did not climb on it as Divya had not been feeling very well. Also, we had to see the fort before we continue on to Orlando. The slowness took another bite as we had a relaxed sea-food lunch at the conch house restaurant. We had gator tail for starters and I imagined the picture of Niya having the gator nuggets as the diagonal to she meeting the real alligator in the everglades trip to be done later on in the week. The trip was meant to be a cuisine vacation as well, we had Anastasia shrimp pasta and Fish Tacos against the menu.http://www.conch-house.com/Lunch_Menu.pdf.We had a nice lunch but also ate a lot of precious time.
Fort : Next we went to the 15th century fort. I took out the camera and I just moved around where it led. Such camera encounters usually don't end with many good photographs but at the same time the involvement is very fulfilling. Good photos come from a more purposeful approach - the focus being on the result of the photography.
Next, we went to the oldest house museum but that was closed and we rode to kissimee Orlando to our resort.
Resort : The resort was a huge one with 1500+ villas spread across four villages - north,south,east and west. While we waited for check-in formalities, we were reminded of ticket queues in airports.As we drove to our assigned unit, the pale yellow houses in the property looked like government quarters - looked like old villas.Once we reached the unit, the unit struck us a very big one and a very old one at the same time - with 3 CTVs - one in hall and one in each of the two bedrooms. Niya was wonderstruck and she walked around wide-eyed "Endhoru veliya veeda .. ithu nammude puthiya veedano..eththra muriya - ividem muriyundu - nokkachcha(What a big house , how many room ! )" etc.
Divya was exploring the balcony area and shrieked suddenly that a frog jumped on her. Indeed there were frogs around - small green ones mostly. While these struck as a pain on the first day, later we had accepted these as part of the stay as everytime we come back from our day-trip we need to open the door slowly to prevent these frogs from jumping on you and once, one actually jumped on my face as well.
Hunger struck and we bought McChickens and stocked some for tomorrow's breakfast as well.Schedule was to meet Jacob and Minnie at the magic kingdom.
No comments:
Post a Comment