Route 1, Day Five: Waycross, Georgia to Melbourne, Florida

On the second day of the new year we finish our drive through Georgia and head for the Florida coast. As we enter St. Augustine we stop at Fort Menendez, intrigued by ship masts towering over the wooden fence. Jim pulls over and we enter a gift shop: the first of our trip.
We tour the fort with a couple from Miami and their three children. Using a feather quill pen and a bottle of black ink our guide, Victoria, signs our entrance papers. She makes it look so easy, but our own sloppy signatures highlight her skill. She hands each of us a small scroll with questions and a twentieth-century stubby pencil to jot down answers as we go along.
In the fort we learn to dip candles. Four long strings hang straight down from thin pegs attached to a flat wooden disk with a handle. Grasping the handle, I dip the strings in a vat of melted wax, careful not to dunk the disk, then lift the wax-covered strings out and count, “Uno, dos, tres” and dip again. The pause lets the thin coating of wax cool and harden before dipping again. We each take a souvenir candle.
We learn to weave thin strips of wood into a wattle for fencing and dip a bucket on the end of a rope into the open well for water. (Don’t worry, middle-school science teachers, the well is covered with a locked iron grate.)
A young man from a Paiute tribe in Arizona gives us a humorous and informative tour of the Native American village. The Timucua people that Ponce de Leon met in Florida were gentle giants: over six feet tall, with good teeth; Ponce was about four feet seven and sixteenth-century Europeans had notoriously bad teeth. To enlist as a soldier one needed two top and two bottom teeth in order to rip open the paper cartridge of gunpowder and load a musket.
The final stop on the tour was the life-sized replica of a Spanish galleon deck. It’s tiny. Victoria, who has returned for this segment, shows us how to play ‘Close the box’, a simple counting game with dice. In the gift shop I have 20% off for answering all the questions on my scroll, so I buy a miniature version with tiny dice.

We head into old St. Augustine, driving through a small neighborhood with sandy alleys. The pedestrian mall near the old fort is packed with people and the standard tourist places: clothing and art shops, ice cream stands, restaurants, as well as the oldest school building in America. We pick a restaurant and have delicious fried green tomatoes, fried oysters, a blackened fish sandwich, key lime pie, and pound cake with ice cream.
While Jim takes a picture for some Colombian tourists near the old city gates I hear the sound of spoons playing. I put a dollar in the young man’s hat and chat. He’s from Kingston, New Hampshire. (He was pleased to hear we lived in Manchester.) However for the past six years he’s been working in Oregon. He and some buddies just bought a boat in St. Augustine. They’ll stay south for the winter and then head up to New England. “So this is your food money?” I ask, glancing at the few bills in the hat. “Yeah, I guess.”

Back on the road we head for Melbourne. It’s Saturday evening and we’ll stay at Candlewood Suites for two nights, and meet the Ragozzine family at the Melbourne Ward tomorrow. We enjoy the luxury of two nights in one hotel and establish our portable library on the window sill.