St. Augustine Archives - Wayward Learning

April 26 2023

Reigniting the Spark: Our Renewed Commitment to Water Adventures

Carolyn Beginnings, Boat Kids, Boat Life, Following Dreams, Sailing, Traveling Adventure, Boating, Dolphins, Family, Hurricane season, Jacksonville, Nature, Ocean, Sailing, St. Augustine, Travel

Hello friends, we’re back to our water adventures! After a hiatus from blogging, we’re thrilled to announce our return. Over the past months, we’ve embarked on unexpected journeys and we’re now ready to get back to what we love: sharing our exciting and unique water adventures with you. We can’t wait to reconnect with our readers and update you on what we’ve been up to. Stay tuned for more updates and new content!

Chasing the horizon, sailing towards new adventures.

We have a lot of catching up to do, and we’ll be sharing our past experiences as well as new ones with you. From our daily routines on the boat to our favorite destinations, we’ll be posting every week. Whether you’ve been following us for a while or are new to our blog, we’re excited to have you join us for the journey.

Nothing but calm waters and endless horizons ahead.

We are eager to get back to sharing our experiences with you and we hope that you will continue to follow along with us. Thank you for being a part of our journey and we can’t wait to reconnect with you through our stories.

Anchored in paradise, surrounded by the beauty of the sea and the warmth of the sunset.

We will be aiming to post every Wednesday. Can’t wait? Check out our other blog posts here while we work on more for you! Or check our our social media pages on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.

Fair winds and following seas,

Carolyn, Jason, Deirdre & Osiris

Making memories and living our best life on the water with our crew.

February 1 2021

Our New Home has PIRATES and Chocolate!

Carolyn Beginnings, Boat Kids, Boat Life, Homeschool, Life Experiences, Traveling, Uncategorized Alcazar Hotel, Black Raven Pirate Ship, Castillo de San Marcos, chocolate, church, explore, Flagler Memorial Presbyterian Church, Florida, Florida History, Henry Flagler, history, learn, Lightner museum, museum, pirates, slow travel, Spanish, St. Augustine, tourism, Travel, Whetstone Chocolates

Our New Home

St. Augustine is a beautiful city with a hopping local scene and a lot of history. There are even pirates on our dock! We read about the history of St. Augustine, then we went out to explore our new home! There is a lot of beautiful of architecture, a variety of museums and even chocolate! To see how we got here check out our last post!

I think our neighbors might be pirates!

St. Augustine is Old!

It was founded in 1565 by Pedro Menéndez de Aviles and is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the United States. St. Augustine has been under Spanish, English and American control since it’s founding. We spent a great deal of time walking around town just reading about the history of the local buildings.

Statue of Juan Ponce de Leon the Spanish discoverer of Florida.

Downtown

Downtown is a very quaint area rich with history and also modern charm. We enjoyed browsing the local art galleries and finding some beautiful churches and buildings many of which were funded by Henry Flagler.

Flagler Memorial Presbyterian Church built 1889

Henry Flagler’s Influence

St. Augustine in its modern form primarily exists because of Henry Flagler. Most of the beautiful churches and hotels in town were funded by him. He even had railways built to allow people to travel down to Florida and all the way to the Keys. He viewed Florida as an ideal destination so he made it one!

The Lightner Museum formerly Flagler’s Alcazar Hotel

Impenetrable Fort

The kids have become more interested in Spanish as we explore the strong Spanish influence here in town. They really enjoy visiting the Castillo De San Marcos, a fort built to protect the Spanish trade route to South America. The fort was made out of a locally occurring shell limestone called coquina. Coquina turned out to be impenetrable to cannon balls and thereby protected the fort from pirates and invaders!

Castillo de San Marcos

There be PIRATES in these here parts!

With all of that Spanish gold traveling past, the area was well known to Pirates! Just across from us on the dock are the Black Raven and the Queen Anne’s Revenge pirate ships. It has been fun to get to know the pirates and we have learned so much about pirates here they may need there own post!

The Black Raven pirate ship

Fun for Kids too!

With all of the historical charm and modern boutique vibe, St. Augustine was surprisingly interesting to both kids. We arrived in town just in time for O’s 4th birthday and we had a great time celebrating at Adventure Landing a local fun park.

Osiris and Deirdre racing go carts

Tourist for the Day

We decided to play tourist for the day and took a Red Train tour around town. The tour was full of interesting facts and let us hop on an off visiting different local sites. This is a fun way to see around town especially if you are visiting by boat and don’t have a vehicle. We particularly liked the Whetstone Chocolate factory tour and tasting!

Osiris was very excited for the Red Train Tour!

Sharks!

The kids found sharks teeth on a local beach and learned some fascinating things about them. For instance you are much more likely to find black sharks teeth than white. The black teeth are fossilized and there are many more of them in the sea than freshly lost white teeth.

shark, teeth, shark teeth, sailboat, origami,

Shark teeth from the beach

With so much to see and do, St. Augustine is worth a longer visit. We look forward to spending much more time here!