It’s 9:03 pm. The kids are watching super wings again before bed.
Today we got up at 6:30 am to see the sunrise.
After breakfast we drove down to St. Augustine to do the Old Town trolley tour. It started from the north side of town and went south. We first stopped off at the distillery, which was not what I expected to do. It sounded like they might have something for kids, which ended up being some lemonade they didn’t’ like. The St. Augustine distillery is five years old, started in an ice factory abandoned in the late 90’s after the collapse of the shrimp industry in St. Augustine. Apparently, there had been hundreds of shrimpers in St. Augustine and now there were six. The ice factory used ammonia compression to make huge blocks of ice picked up by cranes. I didn’t realize they used to do that.
This retired school teacher and baseball coach gave a tour of the distillery. They fermented mash for 6-10 days and distilled it to make rum, gin, vodka, and bourbon. The bourbon they stored in barrels. They bottled all the alcohol by hand. Crazy. They gave us several free drinks, Moscow mule, a rum pina colada drink, and a gin drink. I liked the rum drink so I bought the rum and mix. They also gave us a whiskey with old fashioned mix, which was great. I also tried several whiskeys straight. It was a good tour.
Then we took the train again, but not for long. We stopped at a chocolate tour. This tour wasn’t free, it was $8 per adult. They gave us a bunch of free chocolate, too much really. The kids had too much as well. I didn’t like the chocolate too much. It was too sweet for me. In the factory we had to wear hair nets, but the kids didn’t want to. When we went into the factor it was very noisy so I couldn’t hear the tour guide guy. We saw this machine squirting out white chocolate and this guy was putting it in a mold by hand. It looked very tedious. The tour guide said this chocolate place, Whetstone, had supplied chocolates for Disney and many other companies until the 1990’s, but then the companies wanted them to move someplace cheaper to supply the chocolate. They didn’t want to move the business out of St. Augustine, so they lost that business anyway and shrunk the company.
After the tour we ate some lunch quick, chicken sandwiches packed by Keira at home, then jumped on the train. It took us past the Flagler hotel again and the oldest house, then back to our car. Harvey was sleeping in my lap. It was very hot. We drove home and I got on a phone conference with a collaborator about one of my research projects. After the hour-long call, I came out and Harvey was bouncing off the walls. I guess the chocolate kicked in. Keira hung out with him on the beach so he wouldn’t destroy the condo while I ate something, then I relieved her. A bit later we came in and had dinner. Dinner was salad, some leftover meats (salmon, chicken, pork chop), and some leftover shrimp with spaghetti sauce and squash. Good!
After dinner we took the kids out to the beach. I make a couple huge piles of sand, and Harvey tried to push his truck into it. Keira used the boogie board on some waves, riding up on the shore, and I did the same. Then I pulled Harvey along on the boogie board through a bunch of the tidal pools. He loved that. Alexandra was content holding someone’s hand in the surf, or poking the wet sand near the water. It was a full moon rising when we went home.
Thanks Ben, I love Alexandra’s smile. We went to Joel’s house for J70 barbecue. Had hamburger, salad, beer. Talked to some new people. At home I sampled some whiskey from taipai that stoney wu brought as gift from Joe Lin.
Joe Lin moved back to Australia to take over his family’s real estate business. I worked with Joe many years on Microsoft team. Maybe we can see him when traveling there in November.