Pascua de Florida

Conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon made landfall on Easter Sunday in 1513. He named the place "Pascua de Florida", for the "festival of flowers", the Spanish Easter celebration. Here are pics from my latest trip back to the land of the fountain of youth. I was the accounting manager and assistant controller at this pulp and paper mill when I met Dubby. Click on the panoramic view below, and scroll left to right. The mill covers almost 500 acres, and this picture is taken from well over a mile away. The Rayonier cellulose mill is also on the island. The mill is built on a marsh of the Intracoastal Waterway. Since the mills have really good pollution abatement, their discharge is almost perfectly-clean warm water, which supports a marsh teeming with wildlife. Here's a roseate spoonbill I came across while walking along the causeway.

The mill exports a lot of its paper to other countries. Hence, Fernandina has a small port.

Below is the Palace Saloon, one of the local watering holes. The main street is quite picturesque.

After the mill, the town's main industry is shrimping. There used to be close to 100 shrimp boats home ported in Fernandina. The number is smaller today, but not too much less. I like the picture below better as a black-and-white, because the color version is drab due to the cloudiness of the day.

I noticed a guy filling up his boat's gas tank at the town marina. He let it overflow a tiny bit, and the fuel on the water made some pretty colors as it floated by. After a couple of days in Jacksonville, business took me to St. Augustine, America's oldest city. St Augustine was settled in 1565 and has been continuously occupied ever since. 1565 was a full generation before Jamestown and over 50 years before the Pilgrims on the Mayflower. Fort Matanzas, now a National Monument, stands at the entrance to the town.

The St. Augustine lighthouse was in the sun, and everything else was in the cloud shadow. No, that's not clear blue sky behind the lighthouse -- it's a dark thunderstorm, a daily occurence in Florida during the early summer. After St. Augustine, I drove to an appointment in Palatka, but it was storming and hence no picctures. After Palatka, I stopped by Green Cove Springs. The water comes out at about 9000 gallons per minute. You can peer down into the crystal-clear waters of the spring about 30 feet into the limestone aquifer.

This spring is exactly the way it was when my grandparents were kids.