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Just before we left Brunswick, our friend Blake Hendrickson sent each of the kids a "rope light" which turns out to be the perfect light source for a bunk bed. Here are the bunks, looking a little like the interior of a country road house. At least there are no Budweiser signs.

We took a combination of back roads and interstates to and through Florida; back roads are better except for the fear of encountering a low underpass. The RV is 12'6" high and suddenly those signs you've ignored your whole life ("Low Bridge" or, worse yet, "Next Bridge 10'4") take on a new and incredibly urgent meaning. Today's RV Tip--welcome the sight of an oncoming 18-wheeler on a back road; whatever is coming up on the road ahead, he's been able to get under it.

Our first stop in Florida was St. Augustine, one of the oldest European settlements in North America. Here are Mary and Molly on the parapet of the Castillo San Marcos, the Spanish Fort which stands guard over the bay. This area has a bloody history (our ancestors seemed to fight most of the time) involving the Spanish, English, and French as well as both sides in the civil war.

And here's Molly at the fort with a National Park Service volunteer, reenacting the part of a member of the 17th Connecticut regiment which occupied this area in the latter stages of the civil war. He knew all the details of the history of the regiment and added a considerable amount of verisimilitude (always wanted to use that word somewhere) to the proceedings.

A fellow named Henry Flagler invented Florida as most of us know it--hotels, beaches, and thousands (now millions) of tourists, and it al started in St. Augustine. An associate of John D. Rockefeller, he came here in the 1880s and was disappointed with the accommodations, so began a thirty-plus year career of innovation and development, including grand hotels in St. Augustine. Palm Beach, and Miami and a rail line from Jacksonville to Key West.

The St. Augustine hotel, the Ponce DeLeon, is an unbelievable building; thankfully, when its time passed as a hotel, it became, appropriately, Flagler College and has been beautifully preserved. Nowhere else in America do college students have their meals in a room surrounded by $20 million worth of Tiffany windows.

What looks like the hotel bell tower is actually a water tower; the Ponce DeLeon was one of the first hotels in America with running water. Mr. Flagler also wanted another new-fangled convenience for his guests, electricity, so he hired the only electrician he knew at the time, one Thomas A. Edison, to come down and wire the hotel. Sort of like having Bill Gates set up your network.

Flager was an innovator and obviously had a sense of humor; here's a plaque next to the front entrance of the Ponce DeLeon. Roughly translated, it is the innovator's creed--"I know of no way of making tortillas without breaking some eggs."

Here are Ben and Mary in the dining hall; get a load of Mary's new shoes--it's a vain effort to stay taller than Ben. The tiffany windows are in the background.

Couldn't resist this sign on the door of the cathedral in downtown St. Augustine.

No trip to St. Augustine would be complete without a visit to the Alligator Farm. I'm serious; this is a neat place. It's clean and well maintained, the people are nice, the animals are fascinating, and at feeding time you can hear the bones of the giant south american rats crunch like peanuts in the alligators' jaws. Now there's an evocative sentence, but not half as evocative as the real thing. Mary wasn't excited by it and went off to write postcards; Ben thought it was cool. A guy thing, I guess.

Here's one of the boys, heading for lunch; one meal can last them a month. The farm has crocodiles as well as exotic birds, Galapagos tortoises, and informative shows involving the animals, but feeding time is the best.

All my life, I've heard of the smile on the crocodile; well, here it is.

And here's Molly, meeting her first alligator, Charlie. His mouth is taped shut during the touching part.

Another regular stop in St. Augustine is Potter's Wax Museum. Like everyone else my age, I remember being scared witless by "House of Wax" as a kid (remember the glasses?) and these places will always give me the creeps. They just look a little too, well, real.