2016 Travel Thoughts
Our only true plan for this year is to try and stay where the weather is the nicest, follow the seasons if we can, and be free and open enough to let the wind drift us a bit off coarse. As much as I would like to just raise a sail on our camper and have no reservations and just go with a finger in the wind telling us when to turn, we seem to travel better together when we have a ball park idea floating around between us of where we might be living next.
We are leaving Saint Augustine Florida soon and will be heading to the Miami and Key Largo area for a month. We’ll be visiting with friends, connecting with some fellow full-time travelers for a few paddling adventures in the Everglades and eating as much fresh oranges, grapefruit and delicious produce we can find growing in the sunshine state. In March we’ll begin our migration north and will be volunteering for a month at a campground in the Tampa area. We’ll follow the spring flowers up through the panhandle and over to New Orleans just in time for the French Quarter Festival and will no doubt eat our body weight in crawfish and other Cajun yum. This is a great music and food festival that happens every spring and it’s totally FREE!
We’re going to slowly ramble our way up the Natchez trace back into the hills of Tennessee. Since we’ll be back in the old hood, we’ll get a few boring things like doctor and dentist visits out of the way but can’t wait to connect again with some old friends and family! We’ll slip off and do a little dry camping in the Smoky Mountains and then work our way towards Savannah Georgia. We’ll let the ocean breezes push us up to the Atlantic coast and then into the mountains of Virginia where we’ll be volunteering at a state park for a month.
In July, we’ll mosey our little wagon up through Pennsylvania into the Adirondacks of New York. We’ll play in the waterfalls and sip the grapes of the Finger Lakes region and then stumble our way on up to Niagara Falls. Hopefully we won’t stumble any there or play in those falls. We only spent a couple nights last year on the edge of Lake Erie and remember being so blown away by it’s size and beauty. So this year we are coming back and would love to see all five of the great lakes too.
We’ll take a quick dip down into northern Indiana to visit with some friends and then begin our journey up the western edge of Michigan. By the end of August we should be somewhere in the Upper Peninsula where we’ll spend the end of the summer and early fall exploring the forests, lakes, rivers and hiking trails of this wild and wonderful area. We’ll let the cooler temperatures of Autumn and changing fall colors inch us southbound and hopefully we’ll land once again in Tennessee sometime around the end of October.
Not sure about anything much past there, well we’re just not sure about anything really. This is actually one of many maps we have floating around the camper, but at the moment this one looks like a great way to spend a year. The one thing that guides us is that “Where ever you go, there you are”. So no matter where the road leads us this year, we will breath it in fully, taste each and every flavor, give back as much as we can and softly leave without a trace.
A New Horizon
Your 2016 Travel Thoughts sound really interesting. Some old familiar places and some exciting new places to discover. We find that both of those things are important!! Can’t wait to hear about your adventures in Michigan:o))