Another month and another trip…I seem to be traveling quite a bit lately. Not necessarily by design, a lot of the trips have been last minute, but this one has been in the works for a while now.

I really wanted to go on a real vacation and I really neeeeded to go to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter 🙂 Yes, I am a 30-something and I freaking love Harry Potter – deal with it. However, I knew that I wasn’t going to spend almost a week with just Harry Potter. So, to get the most out of the trip it was split into 2 parts:

1) St. Augustine and the beach

2) Harry Potter

For this reason, this trip will be presented as a two-part blog!

So here we go! Part one – St. Augustine!

Disclaimer – usually when I do travel blogs I talk about the healthy eating, tips, tricks, etc. For this one, I was more worried about just enjoying myself. However, a lot of the things I have written previously about healthy travel apply here too.

The trip started off with an insanely early flight to Orlando at 6:00 am.

The early morning sucked, but it was nice because we were in Florida by 8:30 am! From Orlando, we headed toward St. Augustine.

We got to St. Augustine around noon by the time we got the rental car, the luggage, and had breakfast, etc. We started our first day by just exploring the nation’s oldest city. It is super charming with lots of history. We saw the old city gates:

We explored the Castillo de San Marcos Fort:

Some cute Instagram photos were obtained on the edge of the fort right before the skies opened up!

The Lightner Museum and Flagler College:

We also went on a ghost tour…sorry no photographic evidence was obtained 🙂 and we had a great dinner at Sangrias.

The next day was our beach day! I started out with a run around the historic district. It was beautiful early in the morning. This was actually my first run after hurting my back (more to come on that soon) so it was a pretty slow one, but I really enjoyed it!

Then we went and visited the St. Augustine Light House. I love stuff like this – 219 steps later and we made it to the top!

And you all must know me by now…of course, I had to jump in front of the damn lighthouse! 🙂

After the lighthouse adventure, we had some lunch at the Salt Life Food Shack looking right over the ocean! Then we went and dove in!

On our final day in St. Augustine we wrapped up with tours of the St. Augustine Distillery and San Sebastian Winery. Both places were so much fun and we learned a lot.

However, the star of the show that day was lunch at the Ice Plant. The restaurant/bar had a great vintage feel and they handcraft their cocktails with a level of precision that you don’t see very often.

Overall, St. Augustine was a great place to visit. I would 100% go back. There is so much more to see and do…and I mean the beach, going to the beach is never a bad thing!

Tune in next week for part 2 – arguably my favorite part – The Wizarding World of Harry Potter!