Meet The Guide

The local insider behind two decades of knowing everyone and telling no one.

I came to St. Augustine by accident.

One night, somewhere around the turn of the millennium, I pulled off A1A in Crescent Beach and wandered into a dive bar where a handful of southern rock legends were trading licks for an audience of ten. No cover, no fanfare, just guitars and salt air drifting through the open door. I drove home thinking that was the kind of place a person could disappear into.

Within a year, I had.

That was over two decades ago. Since then, I’ve worked the city from the inside. Real estate. Vacation rentals. The entertainment scene. I’m the tech who runs the soundboard at the show you went to last weekend, the guy who built the website you booked your room on, the one who knows which back door opens to which courtyard. I’ve got the codes to half the buildings in town and the cell numbers of the people who own the other half.

Everyone knows me. Nobody knows my name.

I live in the shadows of St. Augustine, and I like it that way. But after twenty-some years of watching tourists fumble through the same mistakes, eat at the same tourist traps, and miss the places that actually matter, I figured it was time to start writing some of it down.

This site is what I know. The restaurants worth your money. The tours worth your time. The beaches the locals actually go to. The festivals that are worth planning a trip around and the ones that aren’t. The history they don’t put on the trolley tour.

I’m not going to tell you who I am. But I’ll tell you everything else.

— The Guide