Emma and John by Van

I have been dreaming about the Everglades National Park for a while. I don’t know why – it’s just been this foreign looking park with wildlife I had never seen outside of a zoo. I imagined beautiful clear water teeming with animal life and winding canals thru the mangroves. And in reality, it probably does have aspects of that. But that’s not what we saw.

I should start by saying that I try not to think too much about the next destination before arriving and attempt to do my best to live in the moment (I’m still working on that). Whether a good thing or not, I don’t do much or any research on a place other than where we are going to stay. In Florida, all I focused on was where we were staying. Before leaving on this trip, I had taken a look at booking campsites but was discouraged by how few availabilities there were and because we did not know our timeline, I shrugged it off and made no reservations. Once we made it across the country and decided on our timeline for our drive south, I started working on campsite bookings.

There was no clear route we were taking but we knew we wanted to make it to Everglades National Park and the Florida Keys. We’ve been in Florida now for almost three weeks and have been bouncing around from campground to campground – in a not at all linear progression. We have finally made it to the Keys and it is a dream come true down here.

But let me rewind a little bit.

A week ago, we arrived at Everglades National Park. It was a hot, humid and muggy day. We arrived mid-afternoon and spent the rest of the evening getting our bearings and studying the park’s map and information. With no cell service, we did our best to figure out what we wanted to see once we got to our final destination in the park, Flamingo (although we saw no flamingos) at the tip of the park. We woke up early the next morning, visited the Information Center and went to purchase a fishing license (Florida has a super weird fishing license situation, by the way).

We arrived at our campsite for the evening, Flamingo Campground, as it started to rain again. We decided to enjoy the rain with our books and prepared for adventures the following day. Along the road through the park, there are lots of canoe launches and “Interpretive Walks” (usually a boardwalk out to a viewpoint with informational signs along the way. They’re very common at National Parks). As we began exploring the following morning, we realized that the majority of the way people see the park was only through the “Interpretive Walks” and the occasional Alligator sighting on the side of the road. The campground ended up being pretty much an RV park, with little wildlife to be seen other than the Turkey Vultures surrounding each dumpster. There was one “nature walk” from the campground to the marina and visitor center, which was a paved sidewalk thru the mangroves. We had hoped to arrive and not have to drive to see anything, but that plan was thwarted upon arrival.

So we did the “nature walk” and the “Interpretive Walks” until we decided to check out the marina. They offered tours of the bay and the backcountry, which we decided to do, hoping we would be able to cover more ground that we could on a canoe. And while we did cover more ground, the tour ended up feeling like being stuck with a bunch of tourists on a tour bus and racing through the canals and around the bay in search of wildlife – with very little luck. I mean we did see things on the tour but we saw more wildlife in the marina than from the boat. The marina was home to multiple crocodiles and manatees in water that was so murky you could only see the animals when they came up to breath.

On the bright side, John did have some excellent fishing and the stars at night were out of this world beautiful. But what I had come for, I did not find. I blame my lack of research and that’s alright because I ended up learning my lesson. If you ever do come to Everglades National Park, I highly recommend looking into backcountry camping – that is what I was expecting.

At the end of our time in the park, I started to worry that my expectations were too high for our next destination – the Florida Keys. I had heard so many amazing things about this place and John and I had been talking about coming here since our first road trip over three years ago. This road trip was planned around wanting to finally reach this destination. But the thought came into my head: what if it is nothing like what I am expecting? What if my expectations are too high? I prepared myself for the worst: hurricanes had ruined everything, the water would be murky and brown, and it would rain the entire time we were there.

But luckily, my worries were washed away in clear, warm blue water. At the first site of the ocean, it feels like you are in the Caribbean – driving on bridges over pristine waters and under vibrant blue skies. The breeze is familiar, warm and humid, though not the overpowering humidity of inland Florida. As you pass from island to island, over bridges, it feels like you have arrived in a new place. Every other store along the road is either a tackle shop or a dive shop and the excitement builds as you get further south.

We have been in the Keys for two nights now and it has been magical. We have finally set up our camping chairs and our hammock (although it may rain in a bit, so who knows how long they’ll last). We have been in swimsuits for 48 hours now and it feels so good. We went snorkeling three times already and we hoping to get a dive in later before we have to head back north. We still have over a week here and we cannot wait for the adventures ahead.

In conclusion, this week we learned something: sometimes things are not what you thought they were going to be and sometimes they are. And when your expectations are not met in reality, it makes the times that reality exceeds expectations that much better.

Until next time,

Emma

We’ve been in Florida for almost two weeks now and aside from some exceptions – which I’ll get to in a bit – we’ve spent our time along the North-East Coast of Florida, hunting for waves.  For those of you who don’t know, John is an avid surfer and while it may not have been our entire reason for coming to the East Coast, it played a major factor in our route planning.  Right now, I am actually sitting in the van, writing this, while he prepares to head out into one of the best swells we’ve seen this trip. 

A lot of people ask us, “You’re from California, why’d you come out here to surf?” And John’s answer is usually the same each time: while the surf may not be as consistent here on the East Coast, every time he gets in the water, nine out of ten times, he is the only one out there – a rarity on the West Coast.  Today is no exception.  

“So, what have you guys been up to since arriving in Florida?”

To be honest, we have not done a lot of significance, so I thought I would take you through an average day on the road for us here in Florida.

7:30AM We try our best to get up every morning around the same time, sometimes we succeed and sometimes we don’t, which mostly happens if we don’t set an alarm.  We get out of bed, make coffee, read the news and check our emails.  If we are not going out to hunt for waves and don’t need to leave our campsite or wherever we’re sleeping, we sometimes stay in bed and read before coffee. After all, we are on vacation right now.

9:00AM Depending on the day, we’re either just making breakfast or we’re leaving our campsite, breakfast in hand.  We have a blender in the van, so our quick go-to breakfast is usually a smoothie.  We usually have a general idea of where we are going to be heading for the day and we set off in that direction.

9:30AM – 10:30AM Sometimes we camp close to the beach and sometimes we aren’t that lucky.  When home in Santa Cruz, we would often spend our weekends driving up and down the Central Coast looking for empty surf spots.  Life on the road isn’t usually much different than that.  We typically find a beach, check the surf and decided to either stay or keep looking.  Sometimes we score and sometimes we don’t, that’s part of surfing though. 

12:30PM Lunch time! Usually a salad or a sandwich, nothing that takes too long to put together.  Sometimes we eat lunch in random parking lots and sometimes we get an awesome parking spot on the beach.  

1:30PM After we eat and clean up lunch, John sometimes gets back in the water or we call it an early day and head to a campsite or curl up with our books.  

5:00PM If we aren’t already where we are camping, we head there or are just arriving there.  We have found that the later we arrive at a campsite, the later we eat and the later we go to bed. In the winter time, it is really hard to be camping when it gets dark at 4:30PM.  Sometimes, we don’t think about what time it is and we look at the clock after dinner and it’s only 7:00PM.  

6:30 – 7:30PM Dinner time.  We cook a lot.  On our last big road trip, we ate out a ton, with the excuse that it is the best way to get to know a place.  We still think that eating local cuisine is important, but we’ve decided that being healthier and cooking in the van is cheaper and more important to us.  It’s been helpful for our budget and for our bodies.

9:00PM We are usually trying to wind down for the evening around this time.  We have a mobile wifi hotspot, which makes it easy for us to have some luxuries of being in a house – like streaming TV shows and movies.  

10:00PM Time for bed.  

That’s a pretty typical day of the past week or so, but some days are not like that. 

Last week, we visited Blue Spring State Park, the “Winter Home of the Manatees”.  We spent two nights at the park and on our full day there, we went to see the manatees.  Seeing manatees in the wild was part of the reason we went inland in Florida – we tend to spend 99% of our time on coasts.  And we were not disappointed.  

Blue Spring State Park is set up perfectly for manatee viewing and is accessible for all.  The park is centered around a hot spring that sits a couple hundred yards off the St. John’s River.  At night, the manatees move up to the spring for warmth and over the course of the day, the manatees move to the river to feed and then bask in the sun, which is where we got to see them.  Cruising between the spring and the river were almost one hundred manatees! It was incredible.  The walk along the spring was like walking through a jungle.  The weather shifted last week from being warm and humid to about twenty degrees cooler.  The manatees were huddled in the sun and we strolled along the viewing boardwalk.  It was pretty incredible being so close to animals in the wild that we normally see in a zoo.  To say the least, it was a magical experience.

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And that pretty much wraps up how we’ve been spending our time as we’ve explored a bit of Florida.  We are heading further south in the next couple of days as we make our way towards the Florida Keys. 

Until next time,

Emma

When I last left you, we had just arrived in South Carolina.  John and I have never been to South Carolina, Georgia or Florida – beyond layovers in airports.  To be honest, we did not know what to expect.  We don’t do a ton of research on a place before we get there and usually, we just look for a nice beach to hang out at and maybe some local food.  And this week delivered just that.

We left Wilmington, NC with no plan and no campgrounds booked for four nights.  We figured it would be a week of Walmart parking lots, until John’s aunt and uncle recommended Huntington Beach State Park, just south of Myrtle Beach, SC.  We set it as our destination, still not knowing if we would end up staying there or not.  As we arrived, we were greeted by the warmest weather we had experienced so far on the trip and beautiful trees covered with Spanish Moss – not something we see every day.  We decided to take a look around the campground to see if we wanted to spend the night and by the time we made our way to the front gate again, we were sold.  With the intention of just staying one night, we went to get a site and our favorite one that we had seen was available, for two nights at a great price.  So we took it.  

Huntington Beach State Park was unlike any park we had ever been to.  Every site had electric and water hookups (which now, a week later just seems to be a southeast thing), the walk to the beach was through a jungle and there was a 1930s mansion to explore.  For $2 a person, you could walk through Atalaya Castle.  It was the winter home of industrialist and philanthropist Archer M. Huntington and his wife, the sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington.  It was a large house with beautiful gardens and a good way to spend a crisp, sunny day. (Check out our photos from our walk through Atalaya at the bottom of this post!)

After Huntington Beach State Park, we made our way down to Folly Beach, SC, just outside of Charleston.  We drove through the narrow streets of Charleston, attempting to find a good place for lunch, and decided it was too hard to park the van there, so we headed out to the beach. We had been given some Folly Beach recommendations by my cousins, who take an annual trip there, and found the Drop In Bar & Deli.  It had good food, good people and good vibes, the perfect place for lunch on a chilly beach day.  We found McKelvin’s Surf Shop, one of the coolest shops we’ve been to.  The ceiling was covered with boards of all shapes and the used section was littered with unique hand shaped boards.  They prided themselves on “No Pop Outs” – meaning that every board in the shop was hand shaped.  It’s not something you find a lot these days and, when you do, it’s someplace very special.  McKelvin’s was just that – very special. 

We walked around Folly Beach for the day, taking a stroll down the pier there where you could grab a drink from the bar at the entrance and walk with it down to the end of the pier.  It was a stunning, crisp and calm day out on the pier and we were maybe two of five people out there.  We spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out, before heading out to the grocery store.  

We don’t usually do this, but that evening we went out to dinner.  John had been craving barbecue since we arrived in the South East and after spending some time on Yelp, we found Swig & Swine.  We’ve had barbecue before, but this was like nothing we have ever had. It was so good, I wrote a Yelp review about it.  

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After dinner, we spent the night in a Walmart parking lot.  We stay at Walmarts when we are trying to save money or are driving all day and arrive to a place late a night.  In Folly, we opted to eat meals out instead of spend money on a campsite.  And it was worth it. The meals were amazing and we ended up finding the Walmart parking lot to be one of the best we had ever stayed at.  I do a fair amount of research before we sleep at a Walmart to make sure that it is a safe place to stay.  We try to arrive late in the evening and leave early in the morning.  This Walmart had an amazing parking lot with lots of other camper vans and RVs already tucked in for the night when we got there.  Seeing others always makes us sleep a little better, knowing that there is strength in numbers.  The more we sleep in free camping or stealth camping spots, the easier it is to relax and have a good night of sleep. 

The next morning we headed further south, making our way to Savannah, Georgia.  We spent the day at Tybee Island, where – much to John’s dismay – there were no waves.  And when I say no waves, I mean absolutely nothing!  The ocean looked like a lake and the look on John’s face was so disappointed that we ended up just sitting on the beach, staring in disbelief for a while. 

We spent the entire day there, moving from van to beach and back to the van again.  We made dinner in the parking lot at the beach and, after dinner, we made our way to another Walmart parking lot to sleep.  This Walmart didn’t feel quite as safe as the one in Folly, so we parked next to a massive RV and tucked in for the night.  Despite it being a busier parking lot, we had a great night sleep and woke up to a beautiful day.  We departed early and, again, headed south.  

Have you heard of Amazon Lockers? They are amazing.  You can order things on Amazon and have them delivered to a locker anywhere, where you have three days to pick it up.  A couple of days before we headed to Florida, I order some things and had them sent to a Whole Foods in Jacksonville, FL.  This ended up being our first stop of the day.  We had lunch, went grocery shopping and picked up our packages. 

And then we headed inland, to a KOA where we spent the weekend catching up on some internet related things, doing laundry and getting our bearings as we begin our month in Florida.  

After the productive weekend, we headed back to the east coast of Florida, to St. Augustine, where we are now. We have been in shorts for four days now and are so happy to be where it is warmer – although we’d rather it not be raining as much and that there were fewer bugs.  

Until next time,

Emma

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Happy Belated Thanksgiving!

We have been spending the past couple of days – including Thanksgiving –  with some of John’s family in Wilmington, North Carolina.  And I wanted to take a minute to fill you in on what we’ve been up to as we’ve made our way here.

We arrived in Connecticut in early November and spent some time with my (Emma) family there and in Vermont.  It was so nice to get a good rest in after the long drive.  We left Connecticut and headed south to New Jersey.  We spent two amazing and freezing nights in some of New Jersey’s beautiful and underrated state parks.  On our last trip, we spent an unforgettable night in a New Jersey state park and made a point, this time around, to see some of their other parks.

New Jersey State Parks are incredible.  We stayed at Bass River State Forest on our last trip and we surprised by how stunning it was.  This time around, we stayed at Allaire State Forest and Belleplain State Forrest, both exceeded our expectations again.  We had no clue that New Jersey had such beautiful woods.  

After New Jersey, we headed to Assateague Island National Seashore, just south of Ocean City, Maryland and spent some time on the beach in a storm (which is where John’s epic surfing day happened). 

When traveling south along the eastern seaboard, you may find yourself traveling on ferries and across bridges.  The east coast is littered with stunning capes that require water crossing to continue south.  One bridge of note is the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel.  This is a 20-mile stretch of water that is only passable by driving across this series of bridges and tunnels. 

We experienced it on our last trip in mildly overcast weather and this time we were not so lucky.  From Assateague, it is about two hours to the toll at the beginning of the bridge and the crossing is typically only a half hour.  The weather had been pretty crappy for our time in Assateague and that morning we had woken up to a beautiful sunrise, expecting the day to continue.  As we ventured further south, rain started to fall and the winds began to increase in speed.  As we arrived at the toll, the winds were howling.  Unfortunately, we learned the hard way that if the winds are high, they do not allow all vehicles to cross.  We pulled up almost at noon and we told immediately that we were not able to cross due to our vehicle size (10 feet 5 inches high).  They ushered us to the waiting area with other big rigs, campers, trucks towing boats and other travelers who could not cross.  We were bummed, to say the least.  We had planned to arrive in Virginia Beach around lunch time, just in time to find a Pho restaurant that had been recommended by fellow van dwellers.  But instead of filling our bellies with warm soup, we parked, only to be told that they wouldn’t let us cross until the winds were under 40 MPH, which they said could be around 5 o’clock.  

So we made ourselves lunch, used our mobile wifi to watch some Netflix and waited.  We were hoping to get to Virginia Beach in time to do laundry, go grocery shopping, eat some good food and arrive at our campsite before dark.  We waited an hour and fifteen minutes before we heard the announcement that the winds had died enough to cross in any vehicle.  So we hopped in line with all the other big rigs and large vehicles, paid the $13 toll and began the crossing.  

Looking down at the water, we were glad we had waited. The wind pushed the van around and the rain pounded at the windshield.  The water below the bridge looked angry, with swells that looked to be 3 meters/9 feet in height.  The tunnels had turned into wind funnels, instead of the break from the wind that we had hoped for.  The two-lane road through the tunnels was treacherous and John’s knuckles on the steering wheel turned white as he gripped the wheel, trying to avoid any side to side movement in fear of the massive trucks coming in the opposite direction.  (We don’t have any photos of this because of how terrifying the drive was.  Check out our Instagram story highlights for footage of our experience.)

We finally arrived to the other side, took a deep breath and made our way to the laundry mat I had found on Google.  We loaded the machine and sat down, finally able to relax after the drive.  We ran our errands, filled the fridge with food, finally made it to the Pho restaurant for dinner and finally made it to the very flooded campsite that we would call home for the night.

We woke up to blue skies and found the beach. John got in the water where – for the first time this trip – there were other surfers! And even though, it was freezing outside, John got out of the water with a smile on his face.  As the day started warming up around noon, we continued south.

If you can’t tell by now, we’ve been moving pretty quick up until this point.  The weather had not been favorable and we really just wanted to spend some time outside.  So when the sun was shining as we arrived into the Outer Banks (North Carolina), we were sporting big smiles and t-shirts.  It was the first night we didn’t have the heater all the way up and ate breakfast with the door open in the morning.  Mind you, it was still in the mid-50s out and everyone else was layered up, but we had been freezing out butts off for over two weeks and it was so nice to not have to wear multiple layers.

This was not our first time to the Outer Banks.  We love it there. We have only been in the off-season, something we’re finding that adds to the magic of a place.  Pretty much empty campgrounds paired with endless beaches is our idea of a good time.  Most of the beach on the Outer Banks is National Seashore, where you can pay $50 for a 10-day permit to drive on the beach.  Our last visit here, we spent our time talking about getting the permit and, this time around, we went for it. It helps to be in a vehicle that is 4-wheel drive and has its own onboard air compressor.  

We ventured out of the beach, found a nice place to park at tucked in. The weather was not ideal, but at least it wasn’t pouring.  We spent the low-tide period on the beach and pulled back into our campsite each day to kick back and relax from the days’ fun. 

From Nags Head and Hatteras (the northern islands in the Outer Banks), it is an hour-long ferry ride to Ocracoke, an island only accessible by boat. A large part of Ocracoke’s magic is its remoteness.  There is one road that goes from end to end on the island, a small town, a campground, and two ferry terminals – one at either end.  We explored the island and the town last time, but this time, we spent the majority of our time driving the beach, almost from end to end.  

After five nights in three different campgrounds, we boarded our final Outer Banks ferry to mainland North Carolina, a two hour and fifteen-minute passage. We took the first ferry of the day, departing Ocracoke at 7:30AM and made our way to Jacksonville, North Carolina, for a Pho restaurant that we had found on our last trip (if you can’t tell, we love Pho).  After lunch, we finished the drive to Wilmington and John’s aunt and uncles house there.

It has been an awesome month on the road so far and we are really excited about what’s next.  We arrived in South Carolina yesterday – a state that is new to both me and John – and will be making our way to Florida by the end of the week. We can’t wait to see what’s next as we venture into a part of the US that neither of us has experienced.

Until then,

Emma