Ok, I need to backtrack a little bit and share about my trip to St. Augustine, Florida. There is quite a bit of history in St. Augustine. Primarily, it is the longest continuously occupied European settlement in the continental United States. I got to go downtown and visit St. George Street which contains a lot of historical and tourist attractions. We ate at a nice brewery which overlooked the street and I had my first gelato which I had not even heard of before. It was quite nice.

I guess I should explain who we is. I stayed with a returned volunteer that I met in Jamaica named Anne. She was in group 74, one group before mine and also an IT volunteer that worked at a school in inner city Kingston. She also has lived in Idaho and Eastern Washington but after getting used to Jamaica she couldn't take the cold winters anymore so drove around and is trying to settle into St. Augustine. I might end up that way myself because I really enjoyed the Florida weather.

So on one of the first nights after I got in we headed downtown to St. George Street to check out tourist stuff. It was kinda neat to see all the old buildings. I kept asking Anne questions about it like she should know when she's only been living there a few months herself. So that's how we ended up at the brewery and getting the gelatos. An interesting point that night was when heading home Anne decided to try to go over the bridge again when she usually doesn't go that way. We got stuck in a police checkpoint for DUI. It really didn't take long to get through but it was a pretty big thing. Stopping most of the cars, bringing them into a parking lot with 4 lanes and checking papers and stuff looking for drunk drivers. Anyways, it was a first time for both of us.

Saturday we went to the airport to pick up another RPCV who was coming to visit still another RPCV. How do you like that sentence? The RPCV we drove with was Pat. She lives just down the road from Anne and I'm sure I met her in training but since everything is so blurred about that whole time period, this was like a first meeting. We drove down with her to pick up Joy who flew in from Baltimore for the Labor Day weekend. After some Denny's breakfast for the four of us, we headed down to Gainesville where we met up with still one more RPCV Andrea who had recently moved to Gainesville to attend the University of Florida. All of these other RPCVs were from Jamaica Group 74 while I was in group 75.

Pat also had family in Gainesville so we visited with them briefly before all but Pat went to Andreas to prepare for a night out. There was a Caribbean Night at a bar a few blocks away so we walked down there and enjoyed our time. They played some soca and dancehall music but the energy of Jamaica just wasn't there. Not that I expected it to be, but it was still a bit of a letdown. The best thing was they had pint size (24oz) Red Stripe bottles. Never saw one of those before. I danced a bit but I always save my best moves for last and my friends had been in the US too long I guess because they made me leave at 1 when we still had an hour left. Oh well. I stayed for the dutty wine song but no one even really tried to dance to it. It's the little things you miss, ya know?

After hanging with Pat's family a little while the next day, Anne and I discovered a techie problem to tackle. There were problems on the home network with sharing the printer to all computers. We went at it for a couple hours and eventually got it figured out. Basically it was figuring out how to set the firewall to allow connections to the printer. That was fun. We left Andrea in the afternoon and traveled back to St. Augustine. Joy stayed with Pat and we linked up again the next day at the beach with Joy, Pat and one of her daughters and friends. I got quite a bit of sun that day and even a little burn because I hate putting on sun block. I did get to do a little boogie boarding (if they still call it that) out in the surf which I hadn't done for probably ten years. Good times.

The rest of the week was pretty casual. Joy went home Tuesday morning. Anne had to work a couple days so I stayed home and occupied my time online. We watched Pride and Prejudice which I didn't care for too much having just finished the novel a couple weeks before. For one thing, Keira Knightley is certainly not the plain girl I imagined while reading the book. Anyways, we chilled out most of the time. I don't like to go out every night so it worked out pretty well. I'm sure I'm forgetting something but Anne can remind me if that's the case. I made use of the free night and weekend minutes to get in touch with some friends and family back in WA. I left Friday afternoon to Jacksonville on my way to New Orleans. It was a nice time, especially with so many people to talk about Jamaica with.

***Edit*** I forgot to mention, check out the new section in the photo gallery called Visiting Friends for photos of my time in St. Augustine.