ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — Coverage of Queen Elizabeth II's funeral was broadcast on millions of televisions across the world. That includes on the two TV sets at one little pub in St. Augustine called the Bull and Crown Publick House.
It's on St. George Street in downtown.
Behind the chatter of guests ordering the shepherd’s pie and a pint of draft beer, you could hear the queen’s funeral on the tellies.
"Ahhh. It’s a sad day, she was a great queen," Trish Murphy Nease said.
She is a bartender and waitress at the pub. "I’m Irish!" Nease remembered "Every year, she’d come on at Christmas, and we’d watch her speech. It was just part of life."
Nease and customers watched the day’s events across the pond from inside the wooden walls of the bar that mimics a colonial pub.
"I haven’t stopped watching! This is history," she said. "When are you going to have a queen of 70 years like her?"
"Nobody does it like the Brits," Betsy Speer of St. Augustine nodded while sitting at the bar in front of one of the television sets. Speer follows the royal family. She visited England, and memories are flooding her mind.
"All week. All week. It’s been on my mind and in my heart," Speer patted her chest.
Many people may not know that Florida used to be a British colony. It was for about 20 years in the 1700s.
Currently there is a large British population in St. Augustine.
"I’m from Dublin, Ireland," Nease said, "And the queen went there for the first time to Ireland a few years ago. She wore a green dress. Which I thought was fantastic. That was history for us."
No matter if these folks have called the UK home, or home is where they sip a drink, the queen’s funeral calls one to pause for a moment and even look toward the future.
Speers added, "God save the king!"