Sunday, November 16, 2008

More Touring


I kept the Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses on today. St. Augustine has a fort named Castillo de San Marcos. It's a really interesting visit with displays of old cannonry and life in a fort way back when. For the day it certainly was robust. The view of the inlet back out to sea is impressive and for the day certainly strategic.
Would I want to live there? Nope. It was basically all about munitions and some meager sleeping quarters. No HDTV, or even radio. Wait. This was the 1600's. But they found ways to amuse themselves having left graffiti around. It was faded and to date some of it escapes translation.

Moving on we visited the ubiquitous Alligator Farm. Lotso big fat reptiles that snap. The high point of this was watching a cute young blond tease them with previously frozen (sorry no fresh stuff here) thawed out rats. She had good aim and could take a 1 pound rat and bounce it off a gator. In spite of landing them right next to the gator's head, sometimes it took several minutes for the deed to be done. They move that slowly.

Today I saw the biggest spider I have ever seen. Not close up, but close enough for me. It has an abdomen about the size of a thumb. The web spanned a pool of water between two trees. If you walked into this web, I'm willing to bet you would freak. This spider might be able to take out a small bat, but sparing that, it could certainly do a job on someone's underwear. Click the photo and scroll around. It's not the best photo in the world but you'll get an idea of the scope of the size of the crite.

1 comment:

ClimbhighAK said...

Well, it's the 19th and no more updates to the blog since the 16th. Are you slacking or should we be worried about pirates? I assume you heard about the oil tanker the Somali pirates took over. A ship that's three times the size of an aircraft carrier taken over by some pirates; amazing.

It's 9 degrees on this cozy morning up here in Alaska. What's the weather like down there?