ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — St. Augustine was was busier Monday than it has been in a while, but it was still on the quiet side. Some businesses are open, but certainly not all of them.
The show is back on at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm.
The Meemkin family checked out the attraction Monday, all were wearing face masks.
Elizabeth Meemken said, "It’s my step daughter's 13th birthday, so we are out to celebrate. We’re trying to be safe and live our lives."
The attraction actually re-opened Friday.
Alligator Farm Director John Brueggen said the park staff has implemented various additions to help keep visitors safe.
"We’ve doubled our efforts to make sure all the surfaces you might touch are clean," he said. "We said we won’t have more than 25% maximum capacity. We’ve taken out most of the tables in the snack bar."
Just a couple miles away, the usually tourist-filled St. George Street in downtown St. Augustine had a few people on it Monday. A handful of shops and restaurants were open.
Not everyone is choosing to open.
Cindy Stavely operates the Colonial Quarter which includes three restaurants. All of them remain closed for now.
"We don’t know if the business is going to be there, first of all, to warrant reopening," she told First Coast News. "We’re also in the process of ordering Plexiglas shields and ordering touch-free hand sanitizer stations."
She said those changes and other measures are recommendations from the CDC.
"It’s just going to take a while for us to do that and I think that’s what a lot of other restaurants are going to be doing that haven’t been open," Stavely said.
The Colonial Experience is an outdoor tour of what colonial life was like, Stavely said it also remains closed.
"We could open," she said, "but we’ll wait to see what the traffic looks like downtown this week."
She later added, "It wouldn’t be smart to open if there’s no one to come through the door."
Other attractions such as The old Jail and Old Town and the trolleys remain closed while management readies a plan to reopen soon.
Back at the Alligator Farm, the fact that it is mostly outdoors may have been what enabled it to re-open as soon as it could.
Visitor Elizabeth Meemken said, "We’re concerned enough to wear masks. We’re not concerned enough to stay home."