Old Town & Chapel (last post from Florida in May)

But wait! Before we delve too far into our road trip this summer, I have one more draft about Florida sitting in my queue!

Here are some pictures of the little downtown area in St. Augustine. We visited the Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine a couple of times, once when Rachel was sick and then once again when she was better. She had really hoped to see the oldest wooden schoolhouse in the USA, so we took a picture in front of it for her. We considered going inside but it was, like, $6 per person or something and...so we just looked at the outside. We stopped here with Rachel as well, though I don't know where the picture of her is.

Anyway, the cathedral. 

We went inside in between worship sessions and listened to the lovely music they had playing. Andrew wanted to find someone to ask if Miriam could play the organ, but this was easier said than done. We could find nobody aside from the gift shop lady (and she said she didn't know).

So no organ playing for Miriam. Instead we just admired the architecture and stained glass windows and things.

Here's a picture of our second time in the cathedral (you can tell because Rachel is with us): 

Walking through the old town was entertaining (but a rather mild form of entertainment, as we'd learn after walking through New Orleans' French Quarter). On Sunday there were many, many, many people pushing pamphlets and things, trying to save our souls, as well as some performers, and a whole lot of tourists.

On the day we went to the pirate museum (not Sunday), we were drawn to Ben's Pretzels (they gave us free samples and they were delicious, so delicious that we came home and made a copy-cat recipe (not so delicious that we wanted to pay that much for a piece of bread)). When we went to take a picture of Benjamin beneath the Ben's Pretzels sign, we noticed that MiMi's Famous Crepes was right next door, so we had Miriam stand under the MiMi's Crepes sign (she's even got a striped shirt on like the girl on the sign):

The next store down say says something about Jean Pierre, so Andrew goes, "Miriam, stand under the Mimi's sign. Benjamin, stand under the Ben's sign," and then, noticing that a couple of tourists were watching him set up this picture, he pointed at Alexander and said, "Jean Pierre, go stand under the Jean Pierre sign!"

And the onlookers were like, "No way!"

And Alexander was like, "Uhhh...that's not my name...."

It gave us all a good laugh. Later we found the House of Z and had Zoë stand with that sign:

Here are a few more pictures of us walking in the old town:

Oh, one other free sample we got along our way was of popcorn—some sort of caramel popcorn and then bananas foster, which I expected to be strange but was actually quite delicious. 

Anyway, let's see.

Here's Phoebe after walking around downtown...on Pirate Museum day? Some other day?...in the rain and she was fed up with everything. I'm pretty sure it was the Pirate Museum day because when we emerged from the Pirate Museum everything was quite wet outside and she found a puddle just outside the door and wanted to go swimming and I...said no.

And that was terrible. 

A real life tragedy.

So Andrew picked her up and started to carry her, which she didn't really appreciate, either. When she's in a mood where she'd like to get down and get into mischief, she likes me to carry her because she knows that she can out-wrestle me if she just works hard enough. But she can't seem to out-wrestle Daddy yet, so if he's got her then she's just stuck.

And that's horrible.

So here she is, screaming and screaming and screaming...

And then I said, "Oh, wave to..."

I can't even remember what it was I told her to wave to. A bus? A truck? A bird?

Whatever it was, it was worth screaming for in order to give it a proper wave and watch it go by.

And I believe that wraps up our Florida trip. So now we can focus on our road trip!