By Christine Tibbetts
TIFTON
March 09, 2008 09:07 pm
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When you open the hotel door and your stomach flips — praise and hallelujah for recognizing glorious moments in life. That gasp you let out could be for something remarkably fine.
Sometimes those first hotel views call for a crash course in tolerance. I’ve checked out faster than I checked in when conditions weren’t right.
My out-loud gasp and throat-in-the-stomach feeling one February day on Florida’s east coast were the happy kind in an off-season holiday. Expected nice. Got more.
Photographer husband G. W. Tibbetts and I opened the door to our room at Florida’s Ponte Vedra Inn & Club in February, glad to be out of the Toyota Camry.
Direct view to the beach. Front door to back window in a straight line. Bed looked fine and the other details too, but that instant first view told us volumes about this place just 31 miles from Jacksonville and even closer to historic St. Augustine.
Our room wasn’t the special one. Every room gives that immediate ocean view, and you don’t have to ride an elevator umpteen levels to get it. This Inn with 250 rooms is two stories and no more. Ponte Vedra won’t let high rises on the beach; only the lighthouse is tall. That’s a glorious change from so many American beaches.
We had already admired the 1874 lighthouse from several angles: across the Matanzas River from downtown St. Augustine, looking past sailboats and schooners, and also at its base, looking up.
Even better would be planning ahead at least 48 hours and scheduling a Victorian picnic on the grounds, complete with the props to play late 1800s games, a walking tour guide book and admission to the tower and museum.
This is a brand-new offering, so new if you book soon you might be the first with a picnic for two for $50 or family of four for $75.
Lighthouse grounds include the 1886 and 1876 kitchens, Coast Guard buildings, Lighthouse Park neighborhood, Salt Run beach and fishing pier and many historic markers.
History converges like this in easy ways when you mix and match a holiday in Ponte Vedra with St. Augustine, considered America’s oldest city.
"We really honor local history here," says history buff David Nolan. His e-mail address is the clue to his passion: SaveOurHistory is how it starts.
Nolan likes nothing better than pointing out interesting architecture like the octagon- shaped house built in 1886 on Anastasia Island, just a quick trip across the Bridge of Lions.
Used to need a coal-powered train to get across, and Nolan said cinders from the smokestacks burned everybody’s clothes. A new draw span bridge under construction today matches the design of the old one — which will become an underwater reef — instead of introducing a new look out of sync with the history.
That decision, of course, took lots of community conversation and from historian Nolan’s way of looking at things is evidence of community pride.
"When the original bridge was christened in 1927, several little girls cut the ribbon. One of them, now in her nineties, tied the ribbon together to close that bridge and open the new," Nolan says with pride.
Sometimes when you travel, local pride feels a bit trumped up, exaggerated. The Ponte Vedra and St. Augustine kind felt substantial to me.
People seem to come here and stay. Or start here and see no good reason to move on. Andy Radovic likes those rooms with the instant ocean view at the Ponte Vedra Inn & Club so much he’s been on staff 21 years.
He’s outranked by his colleague with 47 years here. Today this is a AAA Five Diamond resort, one of only 100 so ranked in America, and Radovic says that’s due in part to the genuine friendliness of the staff.
"We’re Norman Rockwell-like," he says, "with third-generation guests along with third-generation staff members."
The cedar beam ceiling and magnolia plank floors in the Great Room of the reception building across the street from all those ocean view rooms give the Rockwell sense too. This is a calm spot, right for good conversation with a friend, or with your own thoughts.
Another Ponte Vedra lingering place with a long-term resident is The Reef restaurant. North Beach on the Coastal Highway is the real address, but just enjoy the drive between the Inn and St. Augustine with perhaps a detour in Vilano and then hope for a conversation with Frank Usina before, during or after fresh fish, Mediterranean pasta or beef if you must while eating by the sea. Every table has an ocean view.
Frank’s family is from Minorca, among descendents of the 1,200 people who escaped famine in their homeland to move to New Smyrna and then St. Augustine, proud today of their heritage.
"There’s a new infusion of people caring about their ancestry, retiring and moving back here," Usina says. Some of them have visited Minorca, microfilming records, learning dances and other cultural expressions to share in heritage festivals and daily life.
"My grandmother taught me how to cook," Usina tells. "It takes time her way, which is my way. Every culture has a rice or pasta dish, a basic recipe to put things in. Perlo is ours, a Minorcan rice dish."
Lunch was more than sufficient for the day, and worthy of the two hours we lingered with food, conversation and ocean views, but by the time we explored the grounds at Ponte Vedra Inn & Club, eating seemed a good idea again.
If tennis or golf were our game, we could have built up even more of an appetite. Plenty of options for sports, and plenty for more meals; we chose the Seahorse Grille.
Executive Chef Hermann Muller learned to cook in his native Austria; seems that he too fits the love of history and connections to cultures and traditions like so many people you can meet in these particular coastal towns.
Muller cooked for presidents: Reagan, Clinton and Bush. State dinners in the Rose Garden. Banquets for 3,000. That sort of history.
Today he says he likes to concentrate on fine details, creating works of art with his flavors.
I’d allocate lots of time for his meals. Consider them an event.
Walk-abouts work well here, or rides hitched in a golf cart. People park their cars and forget about them. Simply buzz the front desk and ask for a lift.
Yoga on the beach or in the gym, treadmills overlooking the ocean, two pools so families can revel with youthful exuberance in one and the rest of us can swim laps, read and be still in the other.
I saw a man with one leg prop his crutches on a bench, ease into the lap pool and swim strong, safe laps without worrying about jostling or rambunctious play.
Bring the babies because the family pool starts at a depth of one inch. Talk about easy entry to the water.
Yet another pool lured me in, at the patio of the Spa. Sign up for a treatment or two and spend the day on either side of your massage, facial or pedicure.
The sauna at this Spa has windows; normally they’re like closets, sometimes small, sometimes spacious, but dark and walled. This one is luxuriously hot, but light. Not necessarily a sauna for the naked.
The steam room gave me more cover. At 107 degrees that Spa Director Stella Sigfus recommends for optimum circulation, elimination, healing and a skin tone called hyperemia, the steam is too dense to see the other people, or your hand in front of your face. I liked it, and stayed sort of pink for hours after the suggested 20 minutes.
Sigfus runs a medical spa as well as a pampering kind. Two plastic surgeons are on her staff, consulting three days a week and plumping up lips and wrinkles, Botoxing frown lines, Restylaning wrinkles, decreasing brown spots and fine lines with light laser technology and removing hair with lasers in all sorts of places.
Originally a medical technician in her native Iceland, Sigfus cares about helping people heal.
"We learn many things in massage therapy about healing; we are only using the tip of the iceberg in touch therapies," she says. "Many aspects of healing have a place here."
Maybe it’s what they know about the healing nature of light that explains the window in the sauna and the window to the sea in every room.
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Photos
G.W. Tibbetts/The Tifton Gazette