Florida trip--- Day 3, with fungus,bugs, crabs and flowers!

As we aproached St. Augustine...just outside of town was this restaurant with the same name as my grandson! We had been looking forward to having lunch at a little Irish place in the old part of town, but when we saw this we had to stop! It was excellent, and I am already dreaming of taking my little grandson, Donovan there soon!!!

We left there and headed into town and ran into Fort Mose. Hidden away in the marshes of St. Augustine, Florida is one of the most important sites in American history: the first free community of ex-slaves, founded in 1738 and called Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose or Fort Mose (pronounced Moh-Say).

More than a century before the Emancipation Proclamation, slaves from the British colonies were able to follow the original "Underground Railroad" which headed not to the north, but rather south, to the Spanish colony of Florida. There they were given there freedom, if they declared their allegiance to the King of Spain and joind the Catholic Church.

Fort Mose was the northern defense of St.Augustine, the nation's oldest city.
It was here, on a boardwalk out over marshy land, that I discovered these fungus, bugs, and crabs! First...a beautiful tree limb covered with a white fungus whose name I have not had time to investigate yet! It is just beautiful.

This spider was so beautiful also gleaming in the sunlight. He was fairly large, but yet just out of reach for the camera lens! His body and legs had markings of red, black and yellow.

I believe this is a Cicada. We could hear them out in the trees farther out on the boardwalk. I grew up with this summer sound all in my neighborhood, and we actually used to play with these things when I was a kid. LOL...it was torture for the poor cicadas...we would tie strings around their necks and fly them around the neighborhood. One little boy across the street was the brave one who would touch them and tie them up! Oh, gosh, I can't believe that we used to do that!!!

We found a ba-jillion crabs out in the dark muck at the end of the boardwalk! My daughter got very excited (normally she hates outdoor adventures)...but she LOVED finding these crabs! Here is a far away shot where you can see how proliferative they were.

You can see one giant claw in this pic...but there were actually about 4 crabs in the frame of the shot! They would scurry down in their holes, or be hidden by the grasses. There seemed to be black fiddler crabs, and then whatever kind these were with the white/fleshy colored claws! They would stick just their claws straight up out of the mud and pinch with them...it was comical to see so many doing the same thing. I believe my grandson will have to see this as well!!!

A close up of Crepe Myrtle flowers.

A gorgeous grape vine draping down over a place along St. Georges Street in the old part of St. Augustine...in the rain!

AND...last, but not least...a gorgeous bunch of flowing Periwinkles where we stopped to get a latte at a Dunkin Donuts...I could not resist getting a picture!

I got some shots of two old cemetaries in St, Augustine (these are some OLD dead people in the oldest city on the U.S.)...will try and get them posted in the morning (for Claude, of course...LOL).