R and J in the USA

When you wake up in Florida with any view of the sun, the sandy shores or the lapping sounds of waves upon them, you think, for sure, you must be in heaven. As your lungs naturally move to take in the ocean air, you immediately find yourself taking in more than just oxygen, and it puts your whole body and mind at ease. 

Then, if for any reason, you decide to drive 1 mile inland, the sounds change to the steady hum of traffic sounds, traffic at least 4 lanes thick, if not 5 or 6 or more. And the smells are those of Paneras and Jiffy Lubes mixing in the air. And that feeling of heaven has seemed to ripen into some kind of strange spoilage as that wide open space in your cells begins to get crowded out by the necessities of traffic. If you are not ready for it, it becomes a somewhat sour sense that you are in some kind of well-appointed, extremely comfortable hellscape, where you have everything you could possibly need at your fingertips, except peace or nature. And even to partake of any of the endless amenities in stripmall after stripmall, you must be wiling to parking lot hop. Once you are on your third or fourth left turn and your sixth u-turn, trying to get where you are going, you realize, oh, this is a tricky kind of lovely hellscape indeed. The sun is still shining and there is no real reason to complain, but it goes on for miles and miles and miles. So you drive and drive and drive to escape the grip of the endless retail. Every turn you make laughs at you with greater intensity, ‘You will never escape!” It taunts,”why don’t you come inside and get some new towels, don’t you need some dish soap, or, how about a sandwich”, but you must resist. Ignore its tauntings. And soon, it happens – you burst out of its grip like a butterfly fighting a cocoon for a chance at an aerial life. Before you know it, the quaint and charming character of small town streets and shops replaces the endless stripmall with something closer to what you crave.

And, then, just a little further, there she is, heaven has returned again. It was never that far away to begin with. 

It is a metaphor for life itself. You do the work of sorting out what the metaphor is, but it is there.

After three or four laps of that ocean or gulf water upon the sandy shores, you have completely forgotten the u-turn hellscape of before. What is it about watching a pelican coast just inches above the water’s surface that puts your mind at ease and makes it feel easy to believe in miracles?

And, after enough time passes in the state, you find yourself appreciating the conveniences that stripmall land has to offer – and it all blends into one vision of something strange and perfectly imperfect and absolutely wonderful, and you can immediately see why many flock here and stay. With 23 million residents and counting, with low taxes, affordable housing and that unbeatable sunshine, it is easy to understand why Florida has the most out-of-state residents of any other state. Before you leave Florida, you too, will check out real estate listings. 

Oh wait, here comes the sunset…and you hadn’t thought it could get more heavenly.

Of course, there is more to Florida than what is in view of the beach. The greenery on the other side of those strip malls is lovely as well, and the marshes and the wetlands too. Once you get into the rest of Florida beyond the beach, you will find there is no less to intoxicate you with enchantment and beauty – not to mention lands specifically built to enchant and to raise your spirits skyward, be they the rocket ships that launch from the space coast or the talking animals and princes and princesses that populate “the happiest place on earth”. If you are looking to have your imagination inspired, you’ll surely bump into it somewhere here.

It is a dangerous place too – and we are not referring to the infamous “Florida man”. There is no body of water you’d want to enter before first checking the currents, or knowing where the jelly fish congregate, or, if you are anywhere inland, expecting it to be filled with alligators that don’t make good swimming buddies. You definitely want to know where the sharks and the crocodiles roam. But it is a danger that is easy to be safe from and to coexist alongside as long as you follow the conventional wisdom.

Somehow, there is a harmony amidst it all, and the more time you spend in Florida, the more you start to feel that you fit somewhere in that harmony too.

Our travels in the Sunshine State took us from the beaches of its most populous city (metro areas not withstanding) of Jacksonville down to the most southern tip of the United States of America on the southern shore of Key West. We ambled down the eastern coast through the nation’s oldest city of St. Augustine, through the space coast and down to Miami After our visit to the keys, we traveled back up through the Everglades through the middle of the state through Lake Wales and Orlando and over to the panhandle from there to the capital in Tallahassee and through to to the western tip of the state in Pensacola on our way out. We skipped the gulf coast only thanks to time and felt okay about it thanks to it being the places we had been to the most over the years during both of our many previous trips to Florida’s gulf shores.

In St. Augustine we wandered through the streets filled with layers of history and the architecture to match it. We visited Castillo de San Marco National Monument and encountered a couple who knew we were not from Florida from the word go. You can read about our encounter with them in our People Along the Way section.

We splurged and spent the most money we’ve ever spent on a campsite for a last minute booking at Beverly Beach to be able to get the experience of opening our doors directly onto the ocean.

We wandered further south to the space coast to spend an afternoon at the Kennedy Space Center, a place that one could easily fill two days of visiting with activities to do and things to learn. We got an astronaut’s signature and Julie took an 8.5 minute ride in the shuttle launch simulator.

We managed to squeeze in dinner with Ryan’s nephew near Melbourne and drove our way down past Daytona Beach, Boca Raton, Fort Lauderdale and over to Miami and South Beach.

We headed to Little Havana to take in Cuban culture stateside and Julie was slightly ecstatic to be called upon to use her meager, but passable Spanish skills to order delicious Little Havana eats.

We spent two full days enjoying the beach, the town, the history and the culinary delights of Key West and looking at the bay from our campsite on Stock Island, the next island east. While we made an attempt to score a seat on the ferry to Dry Tortugas National Park, we learned quickly those seats are hard to come by and require more planning ahead than we had had time to do on this trip of a thousand itineraries. We snorkeled the reef and ate key lime pie (Julie found a place that served dairy free and gluten free key lime pie and she was in heaven). We toured the Hemingway House and visited the southernmost point of the United States.

After two full days and three nights on Key West, with no desire to leave, we headed northward to visit Everglades National Park. On our way to the Everglades, while looking into the available things to do in the park, we discovered we’d pass by another National Park on our way that we didn’t know about, Biscayne National Park, just south of Miami. The park is 95% water. We didn’t have much time there, but we walked the quarter mile pier, checking out fish from the dock and then we hopped into the water for a little seaside snorkeling. We didn’t see much accept a few small jellyfish that made us more than happy to make it a very short swim. The water was refreshing and we would have loved to have a day or two to get out further onto it.

We drove deep into the Everglades to the Flamingo Campground that would be our base camp for our less than 24 hour visit.  We took a boat tour of Florida Bay where we were visited by a variety of birds which the park was built to protect and a few enthusiastic dolphins to boot. We followed it with an educational ranger-led kayak adventure in the morning. One of the other participants on the kayak trip happened to be visiting from Rochester and lived just around the corner from where Julie used to live. It is a small world after all.  On our paddle through Florida Bay, we saw a beautiful selection of the birds and other wildlife that the park was created to protect – brown and white pelicans, egrets, great white herons, small blue herons, kingfishers, dolphins, manatees and even a lemon shark for a brief moment. We also had a great conversation with our tour guide, a wildlife biologist with some harrowing stories to tell. You can read about her in our People Along the way section. 

Our morning paddle was the beginning of a long day that had us hopping right in the car after our paddle for a close to 5 hour drive north into central Florida to a town called Lake Wales for an evening 5K during their Mardi Gras festivities. You can read about the race in our 5K section. We arrived an hour before the race with tight legs and feeling the sticky heat. We got a surprise text from Ryan’s brother, Sean. It turns out he was visiting his in-laws who wintered in a town that we had unknowingly driven right by on our drive and he was only 20 minutes away. He graciously made the drive north to us and we got to spend a half hour with him and finally give him a tour of our little home on wheels.

The visit was just the energizing burst that we needed to finish a long day with a little over an hour drive to our home for the night at a Harvest Host in Clermont, Florida. Julie had stayed at this location, a family farm specializing in growing sugarcane, the year prior during her van trip to finish writing her musical and had found it so lovely and peaceful that she wanted Ryan to see it. It was the perfect starting point for our full day at Disney World the next day. Though we arrived after dark and left before 9AM, it didn’t disappoint with a  gorgeous sunrise and we left with farm fresh eggs and some fresh squeezed sugarcane juice for the road. 

Our next stop was a one day immersion in the world of Disney before we made the long trek up north and west. And Disney did what Disney does – delight with magical enchantments, pile steps on your pedometer and suck money out of your pocket like paper towel sucking up a recently spilled milk that no one is crying over. All of the above are done with willing smiles on faces. It’s a different experience being at Disney as adults and we watched with awe, admiration and empathy as parents worked hard to give their children memories while nagivating strollers up and down inclines, fielding meltdowns, managing the gimmees or sibling squabbles. Amidst it all we saw enthralled and enchanted children with their proud and tired parents. Our hats off to all parents for all they do to try to give their kids joy. Disney is a place that’s built for kids from 1-92 and we met two other adults that were Disney pros while riding the Skyliner from Epcot to Hollywood Studios that were more than eager to share their Disney wisdom and experience with us. You can read more about them and our time at Disney in our People Along the Way section.

After a full day at Disney, we hopped back into the van to drive 2 hours north to spend a night in a Love’s parking lot, before heading north a bit further to Tallahassee. We toured the old state capitol building and took care of some errands before landing at a campsite 30 minutes south on the St. Mark River. The next morning, we swept back through Tallahassee for our state capitol visit before tackling the long drive through the panhandle on our way to New Orleans.

We loved every single minute of our Florida adventures, and while we say it for every state, that we didn’t want to leave, there are some for which that mantra comes from a bit more visceral place – put Florida on that list. Despite the fact that there is plenty of life and real world all over Florida, there are few states where one can slip as deeply into a feeling of being in a bubble from it all. It’s probably the sunshine. Whatever it is, we loved it.