January 7, 2025 - January 26, 2025 -- Bahia Honda State Park, FL to Thousand Trails Orlando
Written By: Wendy
About two weeks prior to leaving Savannah, some road buddies of ours called us up and said that they were holding a newly available campsite at Bahia Honda State Park in the Florida Keys. They would be there at the same time. Did we want the site?! For some background, the Keys is a highly sought after RV destination, a right of passage some might say. Yet, it is impossible to get into. The state parks are all booked instantly as soon as they open up to FL residents a month before they become available to measly non-Florida residents. There are other campgrounds in the area, but they are extremely expensive, coming in at over $150 a night, and they also book up quickly. The one glimmer of hope is a website called, "Wandering Labs." Using this website, you can enter in any dates that you might want to go to a campground that is already fully booked. If a campsite becomes available within those dates, they immediately text and email you, and then you can book the site without having to check daily for cancellations. Sounds pretty hopeful to score a spot, right? We were hopeful when we put in our dates with a wide range way back in March, so surely we should be able to get at least a few days within the next 10 months. Unfortunately not so much. The word is out about Wandering Labs and they have a few other competitors with similar websites, so whenever we got the notification of an open site, by the time we went to secure the site, usually taking no more than a minute or two, the campsite was already booked. Then in comes our friend. He is a master at booking Wandering Labs cancellations and can scoop up a site so fast that he is like a ninja! He had already scored a full week at Bahia Honda using Wandering Labs for his family, and now he was just saving sites for pure sport. Luckily, we were their first call. We hesitated for a moment because right before going to the Keys, we would be in Savannah, a 10 hour drive. But this would probably be our only chance to go the Keys. Ehhh, we decided, what's another 10 hours of driving?! Book that site!
So, we left Savannah on Scott's birthday to make the first part of the drive. We stopped for a night on the northern Florida coast and set out to a beautiful beach front restaurant to celebrate his birthday where it was a balmy 40 degrees with a windchill in the 30s. Good thing we were heading as far south as we could get! We woke up the next morning to the temperature hovering just above freezing, thank you polar vortex, and set out before sunrise for the 7 hour trek south. We when pulled into our campsite, we were greeted by whoops of joy from our friends, a warm 70 degree breeze that caressed our cheeks, and an unparalleled campsite view, as we were right on the water. After getting set up, we went down to the marina and immediately saw needlefish, parrot fish, and a manatee in the clear blue water surrounding the docks. Already worth the drive!
The next day we set out to explore Key West, the southern most point of the US. According the google maps, it also the farthest point from Wenatchee in the continental US. We went to the iconic buoy that marks the southern most point of the US, wandered around the surprisingly bustling streets, (Where did all these people come from?! You can't just accidentally end up in Key West, so everyone was here with great intention!), and sampled the local fare of fried fish and key lime pie. It was a lovely day, capped with a stunningly gorgeous sunset over the ocean.
During our next couple of days in the Keys, we stayed put in Bahia Honda State Park, exploring all that it had to offer. We swam in the ocean, walked along the beach, and paddle boarded in search of marine life. The first couple of days were windy and we were not successful in finding anything exciting in the water or making it very far due to the wind and waves. On the last afternoon, after a mid-day storm, the wind finally calmed and the water was still. We all quickly grabbed our paddle boards and paddled out to a small island just off the coast of the northern beach. We had finally found what we were looking for! The water was crystal clear and calm, so we could just look down and see hundreds of giant conch shells lying in the sand in the shallow waters. In the tide pools on the island, there were tons of tiny crabs, snails, and other shells that the kids took great pleasure in searching for. We saw schools of fish and sea urchins without ever having to put a snorkel or googles on. The sun was slowly setting behind us sending rays of light in between the clouds that made for spectacular views as we slowly paddled back to shore. Scott and I sighed with joy in our hearts about all that we had just seen and that we had made the trek down to see the Keys and become closer with our friends.
After the Keys, we headed north to Orlando. It was another long trek, so we made a one night stopover at a Harvest Host in the Miami area, Schnebly's Winery, that I highly recommend to anyone that is in that area. We continued north to Orlando, to the famous Thousand Trails Orlando, or TTO as it is lovingly called. This is another rite of passage for RVers doing the Florida shuffle. This campground is massive and it is the hub of families wintering in Florida. We had heard so much about it, from the pure chaos of kids everywhere to the number of families and friends we would surely meet, so we were eagerly anticipating our two week stay there. To make it even better, we'd be meeting up with 6 other families while there. When we pulled into TTO, they put us in a spot on the infamous B Field. I had heard many stories about B Field, mostly about how and why to avoid it because you'll have kids knocking on your RV door at all hours of the day asking if your kids can come out to play. TTO is always slim pickings for sites in the winter, so we took what we could get and B Field was what was available. We ended up loving our location though. It is a field that about 30 rigs back up onto leaving an open space in the middle where kids can run safely run free. We loved being able to open our door and know that our kids would have a safe space to play without going into the road or into another person's site and that they would always have a friend somewhere on the field. We truly loved our time there, and it is one our favorite campgrounds we've stayed at.
After our friends trickled in over the next few days and we greeted them all with big hugs and caught up on travel plans, we hosted a pizza party for everyone, of course. We had run into a few other families that we had met at various other places along the road that just happened to be at TTO as well, so we invited them and anyone else we came across to our pizza party. We knew it would be a big turn out, so we cranked out 21 pizzas and 18 mini key lime pies. Everyone brought a side dish, and we had one of our best pizza parties yet. There were about 15 families that came and hung out for the afternoon as we slowly made pizzas. I mingled among the crowd and invited others who were in the field looking on with curiosity. Our mission was always inclusion and community building, so I never wanted anyone to feel left out. Everyone was always invited. The kids ran around the field playing cops and robbers and climbing trees as the adults chatted and laughed until the sun had set and it was too dark to see. The kids started playing a spooky version of hide-and-seek once it was dark, where we lost Caroline for several anxious moments as she quietly hid in a shadowy corner behind the bathhouse. That was my cue to call it a night for us. I picked up a sleepy eyed Caroline and found Parker yawning and trying his best to keep up with some older kids, but he willingly came in for bedtime. My heart was full as I put the kids to bed that night. I was utterly exhausted, yes, but my body was jazzed. It was another successful afternoon of community building spent with great friends and bringing people together.
The rest of our time in Orlando was spent spontaneously hanging out with friends in the campground or going on outings with them exploring the surrounding area. We would open our door and be greeted by at least three kids waiting to play each morning. In the afternoons, we would pull up a chair and a beverage and sit and chat with parents as they finished up their work day or took a break to socialize for a bit before making dinner. In the evenings, after we put our kids to bed, we would often message the group about a fire, and before we knew it, 10-15 adults would be sitting around our fire pit chatting until well past midnight. We spent a rainy day at the Orlando Science Center with two other families. Our kids explored a dinosaur dig, touched sting rays in a tank, and experienced what it felt like to be in a tornado. Another day, we went to story time at the local library with 5 other families, while another afternoon was spent hiking on local trails with friends.
I've talked about this in previous posts, but one of my favorite parts of traveling fulltime in an RV is the ability to quickly build a strong community and make lasting friendships in a short period of time. We might have only been with these families for a little over a week, but due to our close proximity and lack of other extracurricular activities (no school day, no after school sports practice, no evening PTA meetings), we had time. Time to enjoy each other's company. Time to get to know each. Time to build lasting friendships. In the "real world," as those that don't travel like to call it, you often don't have the time. You are rushing between activities and having to spend a lot of time in the car driving around. It is hard to coordinate an after school play date with friends or a Saturday evening dinner with two families. But when we all live in the same small space, all we simply have to do is open our door, and we will find our community when we are parked close to friends. It is so much easier to get to really know a person when I can hang out with them for two hours while we watch our kids play at the playground and then for another hour while we share a meal together and then for another 3 hours after our kids are in bed and we can talk uninterrupted around a campground. Put that on repeat for a week and that time adds up into a solid friendship in a seemingly short amount of time. It's no surprise then that during our time at TTO, we were able to deepen our existing relationships and make some new friends who felt like old friends by the time we left.
On our last day at TTO, we made a long drive out to Silver Springs State Park with our friends that we went down to the Keys with. They had promised us paddle boarding with manatees at this park, and we were hoping we wouldn't be disappointed. We set out early to avoid crowds and although it was a brisk morning in the 50s, we were rewarded with warm sunshine and a quiet paddle through the narrow entrance to the springs almost all to ourselves. The surrounding forest was thick and it felt like we were paddling through the Amazon jungle before it opened up to the springs. Almost immediately, we were greeted by dozens of manatees swimming just below our boards. They slowly swam along, gentle as can be, and not worried at all about our presence. There were babies swimming side by side with their mommies, and we oohed and aahed at their cuteness. It was a magical paddle with gorgeous scenery, adorable manatees, and good friends. It was the perfect way to end an amazingly awesome two weeks with friends.
Apparently our whole three months in Florida was going to be one big party, so we were eagerly anticipating our next stop. We said good bye to TTO and our friends with just a touch of sadness, but we knew we'd see most of them again in a week at a different campground. We loaded up and set out for our shortest travel day yet, of only 20 minutes, to our next destination that we'd been planning for over a year.