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Three Florida State Parks: Jonathan Dickinson, Blue Spring, & Anastasia
We absolutely love Florida State Parks and spent the next 5 weeks at some of the best. Our first stop was a return to one of our favorites, Jonathan Dickinson in Jupiter. The sea grapes didn’t make it through Florida’s cold winter, so the park was a little brown this year. Cody was highly entertained by the tortoises and birds at the park. She loved this cardinal so much that she went on a minor hunger strike after we left. We spent our weekend days either shopping or at the beach, because that’s what you do in Jupiter. Our next stop was Blue Spring State Park, an hour northeast of…
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A Week at Flamingo in Everglades National Park
During our first Florida winter in 2023, we made a couple of day trips to the Everglades and decided we wanted to stay at the Flamingo campground someday. So this year, we drove to the Florida Bay at the end of the road and spent a week looking for wildlife. The campground is operated by a concessionaire rather than by the NPS, so it’s hardly a deal. But the campsites have electric hookups and are large enough to fit any size rig. We loved our week there. The first thing we did was check out the newly opened visitor center, which was under construction the last time we were there.…
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Back to the Florida Keys
We loved spending the winter in Florida’s State Parks so much last year that we decided to do it all over again this year. Right after Christmas, we beelined to Curry Hammock State Park in Marathon, where we had a waterfront campsite, and Michael was still on PTO. Curry Hammock is a tiny state park with a tiny campground. There are almost no day visitors, so if you are staying there, it’s like your own private oasis in the otherwise very crowded Florida Keys. The weather was great, so we had a lot of beach time. We also walked the Old 7-mile bridge every morning. The north side has a…
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Cumberland Island National Seashore & Back to Florida
After Savannah, we turned and headed back toward Florida for our niece’s confirmation weekend. We had an extra week to fill, and Crooked River State Park, near St Mary’s, Georgia, looked great and had availability. We had a water/electric site, but if we had booked early, there were also full hookup and riverfront sites. St. Mary’s is the gateway to Cumberland Island National Seashore. We explored the historic waterfront downtown, visited the museum and visitor center, and were able to book last-minute ferry tickets to the island. Once on the island, we started the ~5-mile Dungeness Loop trail, which took us to the Carnegies’ former vacation home, Dungeness ruins. The…
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More Florida Fun in Naples, Jupiter, & Melbourne
At the beginning of March, we left the Keys and headed to southwest Florida to visit our friends Betty and Mike who volunteer at Koreshan State Park in Estero. I was happy to find out that Koreshan is big rig-friendly. I love being cocooned in these Florida jungle-like campsites but the Brinkley has limited our options a little. We spent most of our time exploring Naples, ~25 miles south of Koreshan SP. Besides shopping and restaurants, Naples is home to swamp buggy races! At some point in Naples’s history, which is located on the edge of the Everglades, someone invented a swamp buggy as a mode of transportation. The locals…
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Six Weeks in Paradise: Florida Keys
There are times Michael and I feel particularly thankful that we’re full-time RVing and spending the winter in the Florida Keys is certainly one of those times! We love the laid-back vibe and tropical atmosphere of the Keys and the state parks in the Keys are the things dreams are made of. With limited daylight in January/February, we didn’t do much during the week after work other than walk around the campgrounds we were staying in. We started at Curry Hammock State Park, in the middle Keys near Marathon. Curry Hammock is a small park, so when we wanted a longer walk, we drove to the Old 7 Mile Bridge.…
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Back on the Road & Beginning a Year of East Coast Travel
After spending almost all of the Fall and the holidays with our family in western NC, we’re finally back on the road and excited for a year of East Coast travel! While stationary, I joined the gym and went to daily exercise classes with my mom and Michael made some work trips to Raleigh and Richmond. Our long stay was divided by a trip to Jacksonville to get solar panels, batteries, and an inverter installed by the same people who installed our previous flawless system. Michael also rigged up a water filtration/softener system so that any water coming into our camper from an outside connection or our fresh water tank…
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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…
