Days 1-2: Down to Florida

On the Sunday before Thanksgiving Allyson and I got a babysitter so we could relax together and go over Christmas plans. The next day we were leaving to take a family trip to the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee for Thanksgiving. We stopped for coffee and I pointed out that the weather forecast didn't look so great for our trip. It was supposed to rain for at least one full day, and then it was going to be in the 40's for a couple more. Not great weather for getting out in the National Park and checking out Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge. I said to Allyson something like "Wouldn't it be nice to be going somewhere with better weather, like Florida?". Allyson simply responded with "Well why don't we?"

I brought up the reservations we'd have to try and cancel and concerns about such a last-minute change of plans. Allyson said "Isn't that why we have a motorhome? So we can go wherever we want?" She was right. I thought for a moment then said let me see if I can cancel these reservations. We went home and within an hour we were telling the girls to pack swimsuits because we were going to Florida!

The drive to Gatlinburg was already 8.5 hours, so getting further south to Florida was going to be a bit of a haul. At first we weren't even sure where we'd go, but we knew it would need to be in Northern Florida to keep the drive time down. Allyson suggested St. Augustine and that is where we ended up . It was about 14 hours to St. Augustine and we knew we'd need a rental car which adds time on the way into a town. With all the travel time ahead of us we decided to leave ASAP on Sunday. Fortunately I had packed all the food already so we just needed to finish grabbing some bedding and clothes and we were off.

The plan on Sunday was to get as far south as possible in the evening and then sleep for a few hours and keep going. We ended up making it just past Charleston, WV and then stopped at Cracker Barrel to sleep. The next morning we were back up around 5am and on the road early. The drive through the rest of West Virginia, Virginia, and part of North Carolina was pretty tough. As you go south through West Virginia you really don't hit mountains until you pass Charleston. So we were going through all the mountains, in the dark, and there was a lot of fog as well. It was tiring to drive through all that, but when the fog broke there were some great views off of I-77.

The driving was tough, but during breaks I can go in back and lay down with these sleeping beauties for a few minutes.

We eventually made it through South Carolina and into Georgia where we stopped at our beloved Buc-cees. We got gas, took a break, and stocked up on all the good snacks.

With all the stops we made (primarily to get Nolan out of his car seat) we didn't get down to Jacksonville until around 6pm, which meant we were in the midst of rush hour traffic as we worked our way over to pick up the rental car on the west side of town. This would turn out to be a bit of an adventure.

Typically when we get rental cars we rent a mini-van from Enterprise. It rarely goes smoothly. More often than not we get a phone call the morning of our reservation telling us they don't have a van, which sets off a whole bunch of anxiety and re-planning. The Enterprise's in the Jacksonville area were all out of vans. So on this trip we decided to use Turo. Turo is like Airbnb for cars. It feels a bit different because you're renting someone's car (or at least you think you are if you're as naive as I was) but the perk is you reserve the specific car you want. So I was able to find a Ford Transit van which was only $300 for five days. That is cheap compared to a minivan from Enterprise. The Transit van is great for a big family. Not at all cool....but practical.

When we first pulled up near the address of the car I couldn't figure out where it was. It was dark, and I couldn't find a location matching the address. I parked the motorhome and got out and started walking around. I pretty quickly began to sense that we were not in a nice part of Jacksonville. Now that we are safely home I can point out that the area where we got the car was given a D crime rating by crimegrade.org. Hey, it could be worse. I eventually asked a man walking around if he knew where I could pick up a Turo rental and he pointed to a dirt lot he was walking towards. A suddenly pieced together that "Alvin C." who I was supposedly renting a van from was really some ragtag company renting a random assortment of cars out of this lot. I took the pictures below from in the daytime when we returned the car, so you can imagine what this placed looked like in the dark.

The photo below shows our van. It actually worked out well. Downsides were that the sliding doors were tough to close, and someone sprayed a whole bunch of fragrance in it that you could smell for a while after exiting the car. But the kids could get in and out easily and since it's kind of a compact van it was easy to drive and park in the congested parts of St. Augustine.

Once we had the car we had a little less than an hour left to get to our campground. Allyson drove the van and I had the kids in the motorhome. Our campground was the Bryn Mawr Ocean Resort. It was awesome. Our campsite is noted with a red dot in the image below. The campground had two pools and best of all it had private access to the beach that we could easily walk to.

Our campsite was complete with a porch area and our own palm tree.

By the time we got to our site and set up it was getting late. We hung out on the porch for a little bit and then started setting up the motorhome for bedtime. The next day we wanted to checkout downtown and then hit the pools so we knew we'd have a busy day. It was a long drive down to Florida, but it sure felt worth it when we got near the ocean and could feel the warm air.