Honeymoon...Part One

This post is the first part of Our Honeymoon Trip.

Lindsey says that I have a story for every picture and I suppose that I do. I hope you enjoy reading about our trip as much as I enjoy blogging about it.

The first night as Mr. & Mrs. Bratcher was spent in Nashville. We stayed at the Loews Vanderbilt Hotel. Upon checking in we found that we had been upgraded to the Honeymoon Suite, where there was chocolate covered strawberries and chilled champagne awaiting us.

What a great room it was and a nice thing for the hotel to do. Terri, the lady from Federal Grove, had packed us a nice little basket of goodies from the wedding, so we didn't have to leave our room for dinner. Of course, I liked the pretty white basket that she had packed our goodies in and didn't want to just leave it there, so it had to travel with us.

The next day it was off to the airport for our flight into Orlando.

As you can see, I am fascinated with flying. I love looking out as we are flying over things, like the Gulf Coast........ Being above the clouds is just awesome to me. Layers of white fluffy clouds are just beautiful, not to mention getting to see other planes flying by as you enjoy the view. I love it!

It was a challenge to bring the little white basket with us and not have to pay another $25.00 fee for an extra bag. It became my personal item carry on.

Anyway, we reached Orlando, retrieved our luggage and our rental car and were off to St. Augustine. The drive was nice, not really much to see along the way. We found our hotel quite easily. The Casa Monica Hotel is quite nice, right in the center of the historical downtown area.

The picture to the left is Casa Monica. Our room overlooked the pool area. Everyone there was really great.

There are alot of things to do in St. Augustine and we tried to see as many of them as we could without rushing through.

Here is a picture of St. George Street......lots and lots of shops. =) One of my favorite things to do while on vacation (something Michael discovered about me).
Here are the gates to the city, you can see in the picture the sign advertising the "Ghostly Experience", boy do they promote that. Everywhere we went they were trying to get you to go on one of their ghost tours. Even people on the streets would see me taking pictures and tell me that if my camera is a digital one that I shouldn't miss taking pictures at night near the cemetery. They say if you take pictures of the graves that you will see ghosts in the pictures with your digital camera. We, however, found other places to be at night, like watching dolphins playing in the bay and seeing the sunset aboard the cruise boat.

We visited and drank from The Fountain Of Youth. We found a Pirate there, he was setting up for a private party later that evening that was to have a firing of the cannon. He took the time to pose for a picture and to show us how the cannon worked and just how far it had the capability of shooting.

We saw the oldest school house in the U.S. and the oldest house and the oldest drug store. I was getting ready to take Michael's picture in front of the school house, when this gentleman walked up and posed with Michael. He said, " I'll be the guy in the picture that everyone says, who's that guy?" His friends were saying what are you doing? It was so funny.

We visited Castillo de San Marcos. It was a neat place to visit. It is over 300 years old and built from Coquina. ("co-KEEN-a") a natural limestone composed of broken shells. You can see the fragments of shells inside the rock. Many of the structures in St. Augustine are made from this stuff.

We found a star fish at the beach. I never knew that they could be purple. Of course, after we got him home and dried him out, he lost his color.

We did however manage to kill Michael's cell phone at the beach. We were walking along the beach, in our street clothes, talking and not paying attention to the waters edge, when we found ourselves in a bit of deep water. Almost waist deep in fact. Just a few steps and we were back in calf deep water, but the cell phone didn't survive. The girls in his office said I did it on purpose. Me.....I wouldn't do such a thing, or would I? =) Hmmmmmm.........

Another place we visited was Flager College.

It was built as The Ponce De Leon Hotel. A very elite hotel and the first major structure in the U. S. to be built from poured concrete. Some of the most beautiful Tiffany glass windows you could imagine. It is absolutely beautiful. I'm trying to talk Lindsey into attending this college. It's only around 2,000 students, very close to the beach, a beautiful historic campus, a wonderful and safe place to live and I would have a very good reason to visit St. Augustine often. =)

The Casa Monica sits right across the street from Flager College and the Lightner Musuem, which is another huge structure built by Mr. Flager. It was The Hotal Alcazar, Henry Flager must have loved building extravagant hotels. When the hotel closed, Lightner bought the building to house his antique collection and then opened the museum. Ahhhhh......to be that rich. It has some really beautiful and interesting things inside.

A few of my favorite things in the museum were the 1860's Bentwood cradle and the display of Tiffany Glass Windows. They were just beautiful.

The shrunken head was neat also and the first x-ray machine was interesting. I couldn't get a good picture of it, but it was big and worked off of static electricity.

Being the Lighthousegal that I am, we couldn't visit a city with a lighthouse and not go there.

So, of course we climbed to the top. It was alot of stairs and I admit, I had to go slowly and rest every couple of flights, but the view was worth the climb.

We had the gentleman at the top snap this picture. Don't we make a cute couple! I think so anyway.

Michael, being quite the history buff, enjoyed reading about the history of the lighthouse.

I was glad to see him enjoy being there.

I found this plaque there and thought it was nice and how very true it is.

I thought it would be a good way to end Part One of my Honeymoon Story. I hope you will return for the next chapter.