St. Augustine, FL – The guide books for this area are jammed with coupons and special offers for the dozens of sights and activities for visitors to enjoy, so we decided to start with an overall look at everything via the red Ripley’s Sightseeing Train. Our tickets are good for three days of hop-on, hop-off visits along its extensive route, and we also got discounted tickets for some of the places we wanted to see anyway. They even gave us a little red train whistle on a lanyard as a souvenir.
As the train rattled through the streets, our driver provided an ongoing commentary punctuated with clangs of the train bell at each stop. The city reflects its Spanish heritage in many of the buildings, constructed with multiple archways and red tile roofs. Palm trees and gardens, fountains and statues all add to the city’s charm. With a history dating back 500 years, St. Augustine can rightfully claim to have the “oldest” of a lot of things – including a schoolhouse, a house, a street, a drugstore and much more.
We made note of several spots we would like to go back and visit more extensively. We hopped off at the Ripley’s Believe it or Not museum and ate our lunch at a shady picnic table outside before heading in to see the weird collection of oddities in this, the first of the many Ripley’s museums in other parts of the US and the world. We saw Notre Dame Cathedral made of toothpicks, a portrait of Frank Sinatra made entirely of thousands of crayons (including blue ones for his eyes!), shrunken heads made by remote South American tribes (with an explanatory video on the process), two-headed sheep, optical illusions, gravestones with quirky epitaphs – plus dozens of Ripley’s Believe it or Not cartoons like we used to marvel over in comic books when we were kids.
Our next visit was to the Alligator Farm Zoological Park and its displays of rare and exotic birds, mammals and reptiles. The farm boasts 23 species of crocodilians, as well as a 30-foot python, a komodo dragon, king cobra, monkeys and tropical birds. It’s beautifully laid out with lots of greenery and natural enclosures and more than 100 alligators and crocodiles. We saw dozens of alligators flopped all over the place and each other, basking in the sun or undulating their tails through ponds of water. Their ability to remain completely motionless, sometimes with their mouths agape, made a lot of them look like statues, until a bit of food was tossed their way and consumed with a quick chop of their great jaws. Maximo, the largest alligator of the park, lazed, submerged, in his personal pond, and we were able to take in his 15-foot length through a Plexiglas window below water level.
Brightly feathered cockatiels, parrots and toucans were also on display, as well as roseate spoonbills, vultures and wading birds. One of the staff members gave us a short talk about Neptune, the blue parrot, who demonstrated his acrobatic skills, perched on her arm. It was a very interesting afternoon!
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