Textures and Travel

A few days of exploring the Ancient City this January had me looking at St. Augustine through a different lens. I've written about it for a full three decades; my first visit was at the age of eight. I've seen and done it all. Or so I thought.

There for a gathering of colleagues from the Society of American Travel Writers, we braved bitter winds on open-air pontoons and wandered beyond the bounds of St. Augustine for an introduction to downtown Jacksonville, too.

Returning to places I've covered in many of my guidebooks as well as online, I needed another way of looking at things. I challenged myself to find a new angle by which to see the richness of one of my favorite cities in the world.

The closer I looked, the closer I focused. The artistry of our surroundings on a tour of Flagler College, for instance, inspired ideas for storytelling, fictional and not.

Each moment of introspection on framing a particular part of the whole led to seeing places I've visited time and again in a whole new light.

The images above are not cropped, but intentionally framed for effect. The video below recaps many of my perspectives of textures in St. Augustine from this recent trip, cropped vertical.