Palatka, FL
Founded 1938 as a small municipal field. The U.S. Navy leased the airport in 1942 for F4U Corsair fighter training under Naval Air Station Jacksonville. On August 21, 1942 the field was renamed Kay Larkin Field for 1st Lt. J. K. "Kay" Larkin, a USAAF instructor pilot and Palatka native killed earlier that year. The original 1942 Larkin Memorial still stands, along with an original WWII Quonset Hut undergoing partial restoration. On the St. Johns River — bass fishing country and the Cracker Barrel architecture of north-central Florida.
Oldest masonry fort in the continental United States — Spanish coquina construction begun 1672, completed 1695. Survived sieges by English forces in 1702 and 1740 (cannonballs reportedly stuck in the soft coquina walls without penetrating). National Park Service site since 1924. Sits on the bayfront in St. Augustine, the oldest continuously inhabited European-founded city in the US (1565). KSGJ is the gateway airport.
St. Augustine is the oldest continuously occupied European-founded settlement in the continental United States — Spanish Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés landed on September 8, 1565, 42 years before Jamestown and 55 years before the Pilgrims. The Castillo de San Marcos anchors one end of the historic district. Two more landmarks sit just a few miles away. The St. Augustine Lighthouse is the current black-and-white spiral-banded tower on Anastasia Island, completed in 1874. It stands 165 feet tall, with 219 steps to the watch room. A wooden tower on the same spot served from 1824; before that, the Spanish built a wooden watchtower here in the 1500s — making it the longest continuously operating lighthouse station in Florida. The current tower is a working aid to navigation (active light, USCG-maintained) and a working museum. Generations of climbers have left graffiti carved into the masonry; the lighthouse has been featured on Ghost Adventures and Travel Channel paranormal shows due to the 1873 drowning of three children near the construction site. Henry Flagler — Standard Oil partner, then the most powerful man on the East Coast of Florida — discovered St. Augustine on his honeymoon in 1883 and decided to make it the "American Riviera." He built three luxury hotels here: the Hotel Ponce de Leon (1888), the Hotel Alcazar (1888), and the smaller Casa Monica (1888). The Ponce was the first major building in the US made of poured concrete — coquina aggregate and cement, hand-mixed by Black laborers — and the first American hotel wired for electricity, by Thomas Edison personally. The interior includes Tiffany stained glass commissioned from Louis Comfort Tiffany. Today the Ponce is the centerpiece of Flagler College. Flagler used St. Augustine as the launchpad for the Florida East Coast Railway — the railroad that extended all the way to Key West by 1912, crossing the Seven Mile Bridge.
Silver Springs produces over 550 million gallons of crystal-clear water per day. From the air, the spring run appears as an impossibly blue-green ribbon cutting through dark forest canopy — the color contrast is so vivid it looks artificial. The spring basin is over 80 feet deep yet every detail of the bottom is visible from the surface. Six Tarzan movies were filmed here in the 1930s-50s, and escaped rhesus macaque monkeys from a 1930s film set still inhabit the surrounding forest — one of the few wild primate populations in the continental US.
Yes, there are bison in Florida. Paynes Prairie Preserve, visible on approach to Gainesville Regional, is a 21,000-acre basin marsh where wild bison and semi-wild horses roam a landscape that looks more like the Great Plains than the Sunshine State. Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto crossed this prairie in 1539. William Bartram called it 'the great Alachua Savannah.' During winter dry season, the bison herd clusters near remaining water sources, making them surprisingly easy to spot from 1,500ft.