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.
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
Emma and John by Van 