Aug 1, 2018 – A Place Where People Visit and Never Leave

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving. “ Lao Tzu

For the past 15 years, Vivian and I spent almost every weekend and vacation day paddling our canoes through the Everglades. On occasion, we take trips lasting 8 to 10 days and paddle upwards of 20 miles from one campsite to another. Everglades National Park is a large and remote watery wilderness area and many campsites take several days to reach by kayak or canoe.

We probably spend more time planning each trip than on the trip itself. Every planning decision is dictated by the king and queen of the Everglades, weather and tides. We study the tide charts, calculate mileage, consult the wind predictions and create contingency plans. Specific routes are carefully designed to minimize exposure to the typical winter wind patterns or the occasional storm that can make paddling difficult and sometimes dangerous.

Check out this short video of our Everglades trips.

And that is exactly how we approached our maiden voyage with the RV. Before we began our trip, I lost many nights of sleep thinking about how to back our rig into a tiny cramped campsite or how it could be pulled up and down very steep grades on narrow winding roads. When planning, we poured over road atlases, consulted RV apps, read campground reviews, posted questions about road conditions on RV travel forums, studied the details of satellite images, and relentlessly hounded our experienced RV park neighbors with questions. Consequently, I created a route from Chokoloskee, Florida to Indian River, Michigan (approximately 1800 miles) and made all our reservations to get us from point A to B. We were neatly booked for the next two months, just like paddling through the Everglades.

But here’s the thing – mother nature has a way of changing plans. This is not news, we all have been there. Our paddling trips have been altered or cut short occasionally. But we are now in an RV and covering much wider territory and exposing ourselves to weather patterns that are entirely new to us. According to our plan, we were to leave Lake Rousseau after three nights. As it were, we stayed two additional nights. Our second destination in the panhandle of Florida was being flooded from relentless rains. We have found ourselves in the same kind of predicament in the Everglades. Faced with 25+ knot head winds across very large bodies of water, we make the executive decision to stay at a campsite instead of paddling onward. That’s the beauty of planning, it gives you the knowledge and confidence to make changes when necessary. True to form, we postponed our travels to the panhandle to wait the storm out. This gave us two additional nights at Lake Rousseau, where people come to visit and never leave.

I was beginning to get a creepy feeling from our camp host’s insistence on that fact, and I felt a hint of sadness not being where we originally planned to be. We could have left and arrived at our next reserved campsite on schedule, but why should we? Why should we drive in nasty conditions to get to a place where we would set up camp in torrential rain fall (assuming we could get into our campsite)? Why not wait until the storms clear out and then go? After all, we were thoroughly enjoying the purveyors of summer shade.

That is the beauty of having our home everywhere we go. We plan our trips with fastidious attention to detail; but we know mother nature will always have the final say in the matter. And we are OK with that, because we will always be home.

FYI, here are the three resources we used the most to help us plan our trip:

Allstays Pro

Harvest Hosts

Passport America