St. Augustine is the oldest permanent establishment in America. What’s there to do there? Well, there’s an old fort you can go and visit.

It’s coastal, so you can go walk around down by the marina.

Meat laying on the St. Augustine down in St. Augustine.

Ponce de Leon, constantly on. The fountain of youth, not robotron.

This is the sight of an old slave market. Really. It’s part of America’s history, like it or not.

Don’t mess around in Florida. They still use chain gangs down here.

Judgment day is on May 21st. Better pencil it in. It looks like this guy changed the date a few times.

There is also an old fort you can wander around in.

These old guys had a black powder musket demonstration. The problem is, they talked for twenty minutes before they fired the damn thing. We lost interest and wandered away.

But the real reason to go is this guy right here. He plays two more instruments than Neil Young does. Sorry for the short clip. I was shooting on my point and click.

Long before Uncle Walt decided to make Central Florida home to the East Coast answer to Disneyland, Owen Godwin Sr. looked across the miles and mile of wetlands and saw opportunity. This is where he would construct his dream. And with that, Gatorland became the first tourist destination in Central Florida.

The park gets billed as Florida’s best half-day attraction. I’m not arguing with this bold claim. It’s a great place to spend a few hours and get more that your fill of alligators.

None of the pictures I took with the SLR on this trip came out.

The price of admission gets you into a couple of shows. We took a look at the gator wrestling program as well as the gator feeding. Something I learned, contrary to popular belief, if you are ever chased by a gator, you should run in a straight line, not zigzag.

For ten extra dollars, we got the chance to feed horsemeat to the alligators. I didn’t even realize that was on my to-do list, but now I get to cross it off. These are some well-fed alligators. They actually seemed pretty docile when we threw them the meat.

While the name of the place is Gatorland, it could have just as easily been called Birdland. There were just as many birds here as there were alligators.