St. Augustine Museums

Besides the old buildings and the fort, there are quite a few museums in St. Augustine. We visited only a few of them. We can get “museumed out”, so only one or two a day is all we can take and still learn something. That left a lot of museums to visit on another trip.

Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum is in town. I didn’t want to pay the fee or see the historical value of the museum but there are several cool items around the parking area including a redwood log home (sort of looked like an RV inside) and a replica of David that uses marble from the same quarry and is the same size. The statue is much taller than I expected.

We visited the free Government House Museum. Interesting exhibits with artifacts from the town…including this silver ingot.

The biggest and well-known museum in town is Lightner Museum. We started our visit by eating lunch in the bottom of the old swimming pool! This was originally a fancy hotel called Alcazar and had the largest indoor pool at the time.

The exhibits are quirky and mostly consist of Lightner’s collections. This includes: lots of glassware, liquor labels, buttons, antique furniture, and even this ape. Funny thing is that I saw an exact copy of this ape in two episodes of the old Columbo series ("Double Shock" & "Identity Crisis") at what is supposed to be rich people's houses. Doesn't seem that fancy to me!

We attended the talk on music machines. Quite fun!

The height of bizarre and macabre was the Egyptian mummy and the shrunken head. Though the stuffed lion which had been a pet of Winston Churchill was pretty bizarre too.

We were amused by the Little Museum of Toasters, especially after John realized that one of the toasters was a much newer version of the one we use!

Our final museum was the Pirate and Treasure Museum. There was Captain Kidd’s actual final log.

And a sleeping Captain Kidd who’s chest moved up and down and slept with his eyes half open.

There was plenty of gold and silver. John is lifting a gold bar that is inside the glass case.

And a real pirate’s chest. Arghh!