Tales from St. Augustine

Last Wednesday, Jessica’s class went to St. Augustine and I came along as a chaperone. We had a blast. We went to the Castillo de San Marcos (the fort), the Alligator Farm, and the Lighthouse, among other places. St. Augustine is America's oldest city and they say it's the most haunted.

We had to be at the school by 4:30 a.m. In the picture above, the girls (Jess in the middle) had red eyes from the flash, but my eyes looked like that from getting up so early!

Alligators
The Alligator Farm was a neat place. In addition to alligators, you can see beautiful birds, cranes, tortoises, and monkeys. We saw a "show" where the alligator guy was in a huge pen with at least 50 alligators (big alligators) and was walking around talking about them. The alligators KNEW THEIR NAMES as well as some other commands. When he called out an alligator's name, it would come to him. It was one of the coolest things I've ever seen!

Orbs
Have you noticed the orbs that sometimes show up in photographs? Some say these orbs are spirits or ghosts; others say they are dust particles reflecting off light. I don’t know what I believe. I’m not really a believer in ghosts, but I’m not a disbeliever either. Whatever they are, they can only be seen after the picture is taken (developed). Take a look at this picture I took of the Lighthouse. There is an orb near the top left side of the picture (incidentally, this is the first time I’ve had an orb in any picture I've taken). What is weird to me is that I took two other photos of the Lighthouse and there is an orb in the same location in each one. Is it dust? Well, it wasn’t dusty that I can remember, but it was slightly windy.

Right after I took this picture, we went to see where the Lighthouse keepers used to live (right across from the Lighthouse), which is now a museum. The tour guide was telling us that he was recently interviewed for a show that will be on the SciFi Channel on May 3. The name escapes me now—something with Haunted in it, I’m sure. Anyway, he couldn’t give us any details really, but he told us about his ghost encounter in the Lighthouse. You should have seen Jessica’s face while he was talking about this. She looked like she was either going to cry or to faint! Of course, after I got home and uploaded the pictures, I nearly fainted. Seeing the orbs was a little freaky!