We spent a relaxing week in Orlando and were planning on spending another, until hurricane Milton came along! These days there are so many tools available to make planning easier. We studied the various weather apps and news venues to see the possible hurricane paths. We used tools like RVTripWizard to plan routes, compared that to Google Maps, bounced those off of our Garmin RV GPS unit – and decided it best to move North/Northwest of Jacksonville to an area called Callahan. We picked a park called Kelly’s Countryside RV Park that turned out to be a great choice! We left in plenty of time to avoid the worst traffic and spent a few peaceful days waiting for the storm to pass.

The last photo is the day after. We had light wind and rain overnight and didn’t even lose power!

We finally made it to our first longer term stay in Florida at Thousand Trails Orlando. This is a really nice park with beautiful, brand new sites. We had planned to stay for two weeks, but that was before Hurricane Milton reared its ugly head. We did manage to watch a Raven’s game at Rock & Brews before we decided to bug out … typical Ravens, we won but it wasn’t pretty. The next day we headed North to escape the storm – more on that in the next post …

This is our first time back to Florida since we started this Full Time Rving life five years ago. So on our way south we had to stop by Welaka Lodge and Resort, the first campground we spent a season Workamping.

The park has new owners and most of the people that were there 5 years ago have moved on, but we did get to catch up with one of them. Unfortunately, the river front bar and grill we loved so much when we were there was closed for the day, so we went to Shrimp R Us, which is an easy walk and has a nice outdoor lounge area. Candi got a really good fish dish and Mike got an okay Shrimp Po Boy. It was fun reminiscing and we even ran into our first Workamping boss!!! Plus, we got to revisit Baja Taco, one of our all-time favorite Taco stands down in Crescent City.

Stayed our first night back in Florida at another Harvest Host, the Royal St. Augustine Golf Course. Golf Courses are always a little odd to us since we don’t golf, and this one didn’t have any kind of food service to get lunch. Still, it was a nice, quiet place to stay and we had a great time meeting up with Rusty and Joan, friends that we met in Denver when we were Workamping! We walked around downtown St Augustine a little and had a light dinner at The Floridian. Then we walked around some more and treated ourselves to a pastry at Le Macaron.

This Thousand Trails park was a nice, easy stop on our way south. It was beautiful in spite of some damage from Hurricane Helene.

If you ever drive up and down I-95, you HAVE to stop at South of the Border (Pedro insists – and you can’t miss the billboards!!).

This makes the third time we stayed here, the last time was our very first night as Full Time RV’rs! They have a nice campground that is right off I-95 so it makes for a great place to stop.

We had only planned on staying for one night, but we’d been watching the weather and following the track of Hurricane Helene, which was heading north FROM Florida while we were heading south TO Florida! It was also following a more westerly path than we were, so we decided to stay an extra night at SOB to avoid it. It worked out great, but we did get a little bit of rain (or a lot!).

Another Harvest Host. This restored cotton mill has been made into a neat area with several restaurants and breweries. It was fairly easy to get to and had a huge parking lot, which turned out to be a good thing since we were joined by several other Harvest Hosters! Since it was mid-week they weren’t too busy and several places were closed, but we did have a nice lunch at Jack’s and a good dinner at The Prime Smokehouse.

Well, after very interesting summer in Ocean City, Maryland (yes, still our favorite place on earth!), we are heading south again. First, we took a few weeks to spend in Baltimore visiting family and friends. Had a great time visiting a winery, watching a Raven’s game with family, tried a new restaurant with friends, and even saw America in concert!

And now we are basically tracing the same route we took 5 years ago when we first became full time RVers! Being from Baltimore means that most of your vacations are spent driving up or down 95. Back then we didn’t appreciate 95 at all! Now, we are sort of looking forward to the conveniences of a more urban area. One of those conveniences is a lot of rest areas with nice bathrooms!! And also truck stops for gas and lunch, as well as towns with Walmart’s for an overnight stay if we decide to.

Our first stop was a quick overnight near Richmond, Virginia at Americamps RV Resort. We wanted a full hookup site since Ollie’s been in storage and we need to put water in the tanks and get him ready to live in again. Found a nice local pub called Industrial Taphouse to have dinner at while we were there.

We loved this winery! It’s on a beautiful property on a lake. They have a nice variety of wines and some good small plate food options. The wine was great and we even had a visit from some family that lives nearby!

Another fun Harvest Host! This one was on a farm near Draper Mercantile.

It was a little difficult getting Rad-Ollie up the gravel driveway, but once we put Rad in 4WD low he made it up there!

Then we had a great lunch at the cafe and Candi walked their labyrinth!!