Secrets of the Locals: Best Ice Cream

You may remember that the hub is an ice cream snob.

Other men may talk about wine at dinner parties--going on about the nose of this wine or the head of that one or the blush of berries or whatever it is that they think they taste. It's like a foreign language to me.

In the same fashion, the hub can wax on and on about his favorite frozen treat--the mouth feel of the cream content, the ratio of ice cream to addition, the combination of additions at all.

Hey, I'm not complaining. You'll never find a $200 gallon of ice cream, so I'm a big supporter of his enjoying the icy treat over anything fermented.

But he can't make ice cream every day. True, he does make it for inn guests on Wednesdays in the summer. But that's a special treat.

If he wants great ice cream any other time, he drives all the way down Route 1 to beyond Wal-Mart (real St. Augustine residents *never* drive past Wal-Mart unless they're going to Orlando. The fear is that Route 1 is flat and you will fall off of it if you try to go too far). He drives to Cold Cow (http://www.coldcow.net/), a little ice cream shop owned by Jason Welty. Jason is an ice cream lover too--and he comes up with weird flavors like Mike does, too (like Trash Can, which is vanilla ice cream with 7 kinds of candy bars).

It's a great place, but going there really does feel like Columbus heading off for unknown and possibly dangerous horizons.

So imagine our surprise--our delight!--when we went to Lee & Cates, a glass cutter on Anastasia Island, right across the bridge, and saw a little ice cream truck parked in the corner of their oddly-shaped parking lot. The sign said "Cold Cow has had a Baby...Meet Cold Calf".

The sun shone down, angels sang, and the hub skipped towards it like a little girl. Yup, it was our old friend Cold Cow, in a cool moveable trailer. They had 29 flavors of ice cream yesterday; the hub and I shared a scoop of toasted coconut (which was exactly what it sounded like) and red velvet cake (which was an icing flavored batter with chunks of red velvet cake). Our friends (who are visiting from Atlanta) got a butterscotch bomb (vanilla ice cream with butterscotch and fudge) and peanut butter cookie.

We all left there very, very happy.

You will be happy if you go there too...unless you go on Monday, when they're closed. Otherwise, check them out Tuesday through Sunday, from 3 - 9 pm.