Days 25 & 26: St. Augustine to Charleston

2026 Rally4Vets America Grand Tour

Days 25 and 26 took the team from America’s oldest city to the deck of a WWII aircraft carrier, with an unplanned stop in between that turned out to be one of the best of the whole tour.

America’s Oldest City

St. Augustine earns its name. We started at the Lightner Museum, housed in Henry Flagler’s old Hotel Alcazar, its twin towers still standing over the plaza the way they did when the hotel opened in 1888. Out front stands a statue of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, the Spanish admiral who founded the city in 1565. Inside, the museum’s collection ranges from Gilded Age glass to a full hall of 19th-century bicycles, including a genuine high-wheeler with a front wheel taller than I am.

A few blocks north, we stopped at Villa 1565, where a live oak called the Old Senator has been growing for more than 600 years. The tree predates the city itself and stands close to where Juan Ponce de León is said to have found St. Augustine’s famous Fountain of Youth in 1513. I walked over to the spring, knelt down next to the old grate where the water still runs, and thought about how many people have made that same short walk over five centuries.

A Surprise on I-95 – the Eight Air Force

Between St. Augustine and Charleston, we pulled off the interstate for what we expected to be a quick stop and ended up staying for an hour. The National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force sits right off I-95 at exit 102 in Pooler, Georgia, and it is not to be missed. The Subaru WRX carries my pilot wings and looked right at home parked under the museum’s flagpole.

Inside, the rotunda is ringed with the flags and unit patches of every Eighth Air Force bomb group that flew out of England during World War II. One exhibit honors Jimmy Stewart, who left Hollywood at the height of his career to fly 20 combat missions in B-24 Liberators, rising to command a bomb wing before he went back to the movies. Another display ties the museum to the Apple TV+ series “Masters of the Air,” with a reminder of what Winston Churchill said about the Eighth’s role in winning air supremacy over Europe. If you are ever running I-95 through Georgia, get off and go in.

Charleston and the Yorktown

Charleston closed out the two days. We crossed over to Patriots Point in Mount Pleasant to walk the deck of the USS Yorktown, CV-10, the Essex-class carrier that fought across the Pacific in World War II, earned 11 battle stars, and later recovered the Apollo 8 astronauts from the ocean. Flags for every service branch line the walkway up to the ship, alongside a memorial to combat-wounded veterans. I found a mural on the hull that read “I Pledge Allegiance,” and stood there in my Rally4Vets shirt thinking about why this tour exists in the first place, so that veterans who made it home carry less weight alone, with a trained service dog beside them.

Two states, five centuries of history, and one very good detour. That is a lot of ground for two days.

What a country. What a day.

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