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Aloha, Maui!!
Sometime in January, we got an offer to stay at the Maui Marriott Ocean Club for 1/3 of the regular rate if we sat through a sales pitch for their vacation club. We’ve done this before and think it’s definitely worth it! Besides, we don’t say no to a trip to Hawaii. It’s one of our favorite places in the world! This was our third visit, but the first to Maui, and hopefully not the last. I was trying to figure out how to extend the trip and realized we should sleep in a campervan for a couple of nights, which easily sold Michael on the idea. He is up…
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Carlsbad Caverns NP & Guadalupe Mountains NP
Our next planned stop for the first week of April was going to be boondocking in southeast New Mexico, right between Carlsbad Caverns and Guadalupe Mountains National Parks. But, a couple of days beforehand we saw that temperatures were going to be ~10 degrees higher than we expected. Being in the desert in the high 80s didn’t sound fun so we scrambled to find an alternative spot. We ended up at Brantley Lake State Park. I hope we aren’t getting weak at boondocking. Brantley Lake was our first New Mexico State Park and we loved it. We had water and electric hookups for $14/day and the desert was blooming. It…
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Austin & San Antonio, TX
Michael’s sister told us about the Texas bluebonnets years ago and we timed our visit to Austin to see them! We stayed at McKinney Falls State Park, just 15 minutes from downtown Austin. The campsites were large and had water/electric hookups. We were at McKinney Falls the second half of March and over those two weeks watched the bluebonnets bloom to peak, followed by the appearance of Indian paintbrush. These fields were inside the state park, so we got to see them on our daily walks. In addition to all the wildflowers, there were also trails around the falls. We noticed right away that Austin seemed like a very nice…
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New Orleans, LA
We couldn’t imagine driving past New Orleans without stopping. We had visited before for our friend’s wedding and wanted to experience it again. There are two state parks within easy commuting distance of the French Quarter, Bayou Segnette and St. Bernard. We chose St. Bernard because, although a little farther away, we were able to reserve a full hookup site. Even though we were only 30 minutes from the French Quarter, the area felt pretty remote. We didn’t find much to do during the week. We went to New Orleans twice during our week-long stay. While looking for a place to listen to some of the city’s live music, I…
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Grayton Beach State Park, FL
Our last stop in Florida was a relaxing 2 weeks at Grayton Beach State Park, located on the panhandle’s Emerald Coast. The park’s campground is a 1/2 mile walk to the beach and has full hookups earning it a spot in our top 5, though there are at least a dozen campgrounds in our top 5. The park had a really nice nature walk featuring dunes, forest canopy, and Western Lake, a rare ecosystem known as a coastal dune lake. Of course, the popular spot is the beach! This stretch of coastline is known for its white sugar sand and greenish-blue water. I found the beach hard to photograph because…
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Kayaking Florida’s Springs
Florida has hundreds of freshwater springs, mainly located in the north/central part of the state, which are beautiful places for paddling, swimming, and wildlife viewing. Our 2 week stop near the town of Crystal River, about an hour north of Tampa, was to kayak a couple of these spring-fed rivers. Preferably with manatees! We stayed at Tillis Hill Campground in the Withlacoochee State Forest, where all sites had water/electric hookups and were very spacious. Manatees are large, gentle, and curious marine mammals that congregate near Florida’s springs during winter months (Nov-Mar), where they depend on the relatively warm 72-degree water for survival. The Crystal River Wildlife Refuge, formed to protect…
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Fort De Soto, FL
After a month in the Miami area, we were definitely ready for a change in scenery. Thankfully our next destination was Fort De Soto, a beachfront county park on the gulf side of Florida near St Pete. Not only were we excited about this park, but we already loved this gorgeous part of Florida, where Michael’s grandparents lived and his sister got married. The beaches are so pretty that they can turn a nonbeach person into a beach person. On our way, we stopped in Fort Meyers to see our friends Mike and Betty who we met while volunteering in Virginia. They gave us a tour of their current volunteer…
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The Florida Keys, Dry Tortugas National Park, & Everglades National Park
For the last half of January, our home base was Larry and Penny Thompson Memorial Park in Homestead. For $500/month with full hookups, you can just live at this Miami-Dade County Park for the entire winter season, for which there is a 5+ year waitlist. Usually, there is a 14-day stay limit at public parks so this is odd. Also, parks this affordable are usually not very nice, but this one was very nice. Most of the people there were from Quebec. We only got in on a last-minute cancellation after realizing our planned dry camping spot inside Everglades NP was a terrible idea due to the need for A/C.…
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Fort Lauderdale, Miami, & Biscayne National Park
For the past two winters, we’ve explored the desert southwest. We love the grandeur and the wildness, but it was time to do something completely different. So I dragged Michael to southeast Florida, which was actually plan b after I wasn’t able to get any state park reservations in the Florida Keys. There was so much to do…south Florida has three national parks and plenty of city spaces to explore. It’s the most urban area we’ve ever experienced for this amount of time in our lives. We’ve felt crowded and a little claustrophobic. The traffic is way worse than imagined. But the weather has been way better. It’s hard to…
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NYE In Jacksonville, FL
A couple of days after Christmas we packed up and headed toward Florida to thaw out. Literally. We’d just discovered that the low-temperature limit of our Arctic Fox travel trailer is 5 degrees and our fresh water tank was one huge ice cube. We’ve had plans to be Florida snowbirds for at least a year because that’s how far you need to plan in advance. Our first stop was Hanna Park, owned by the city of Jacksonville. Hanna Park is awesome. It is oceanfront and the full hookup campsites are tucked into a jungle of live oaks and palms. And it has mountain biking trails! We loved walking to and…
