Written by Emily
Myrtle Beach (SC)
October 10 – 21, 2023
WE HIT THE OCEAN!!! Sooooo good to be back at the ocean!
We had two weeks booked at Myrtle Beach State Park which we really can’t say enough good things about. Big campground right next to the beach (which you can take your dogs onto!) and away from the hustle of downtown Myrtle Beach.
The beach right next to the state park is beautiful and one of the best beaches we’ve seen in the USA. (Writing this a few months late, and now having done the entire Florida coast, Myrtle Beach is in my top three favorite beaches and perhaps the #1 spot because you can take your dogs). The beach is clean and white and the surf was gentle with enough little waves to do some bodysurfing.
We were camped in Site 296 – right up the back of the park – and it took us about 5 min to walk from our trailer and be on the beach. We were there in October which means you can take your dogs on the beach at any time of the day (during the summer between Memorial Day and Labor Day you can only take them before 9am and after 4pm).
There is a lot of bird life here and one of my favorite things to do was to simply sit on the beach and watch the ospreys and pelicans fishing for their dinner. One morning I was walking the dogs along the beach and I saw an osprey in the water just beyond the break. It was taking off and coming back down into the water again, which I thought was weird, and when I got up closer I realized there was a long fishing line dragging behind the bird.
The poor thing was clearly exhausted with its wings spread out in the water and its mouth wide open. Of course I did not have my phone with me! The bird was getting washed into the waves and I was worried it was going to drown so I asked a couple of people to hold the dogs, took my shoes off and went and grabbed the bird out of the waves with my sweater. It didn’t even put up a fight (although if it did, I would have had to leave it there because that beak was something else)! I had it wrapped up in my sweater like a big chicken and could see that it had a large treble hook embedded in the pad of its foot with and wire lure and line attached to the hook.
By this stage I had gathered a little entourage of people holding the dogs, carrying my shoes and calling the ranger station! I carried the bird up to the pier where the ranger turned up with the proper osprey-handling-gloves and successfully removed the hook from the bird’s foot. The osprey was fine and the ranger released it further down the beach. I was late for work that day but I reckon I had a good excuse.
There is nothing special about Myrtle Beach township itself – it’s crowded and filled with tourist traps and we didn’t find any good food here. Justin took the opportunity to sign up as a volunteer for Meals on Wheels in the local area and did a few days delivering meals – which is always a great way to really see a place and get off the beaten track – and I actually had to dash back to Kalamazoo for work for a couple of days. So other than that, we just spent our time lounging around on the beach, which was excellent.
Skidaway Island (GA)
October 22 – 29, 2023
We left Myrtle Beach on October 21 and spent the night at Charleston SC on our way Skidaway Island, taking advantage of our Harvest Hosts membership again and staying at Tideland Brewing. Great little spot to pull the trailer into for the night – they have a pretty large grassy area for parking – and we enjoyed a beverage and a burger!
We had one week at Skidaway Island State Park, just south of Savannah in Georgia. Great state park and campground – I know I sound like a broken record, but spacious sites, full hookups and miles of walking trails. It was about a 20 min drive from the center of Savannah. We could have easily stayed here for a few weeks.
Visiting Savannah was definitely a highlight – a beautiful old city with a lot of interesting history. The city center is beautifully laid out with large tree-lined streets, park squares and the most incredible homes from the early 1900s.
I did not know that Savannah had a film industry. The night we were there the city was filled with film students and other enthusiasts attending an opening screening.
St Augustine, FL
October 29 – November 5, 2023
Finally Florida! I had never spent any time in Florida except for a quick overnight trip a few years back and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Justin spent a month or two at Miami Beach back in 1998 when he came to the USA to work in a summer camp. But that was 25 years ago and he was looking forward to refamiliarizing himself with the Queensland equivalent of the USA.
Our first week in Florida was at Anastasia State Park just on the edge of St Augustine. We loved it. Only water and electric sites here which was fine – we are able to just last one week on our tanks (it certainly helps when you have an outdoor shower)! The campsites are each beautifully wrapped in vegetation so while it is a very large campground with lots of sites, you really feel like you have the place to yourself.
One note on Anastasia State Park campground – it’s pretty tight to get into the spots! Our trailer is 28 feet long and we had a site booked that allegedly accommodated 30 ft – but there was a fair bit of huffing and puffing and leaning on the vegetation to swing around into our site. There are a small number of sites in one loop that would accommodate larger Class As – but you’d better be on the booking system early to snag one!
The State Park has its own beach access (Anastasia Beach) and it’s a very nice beach. The surf was quite rough the week we were here but we were still feeling so lucky to be able to take a swim during the lunch break. The beach is definitely walkable from the campsites but it helps to have a bicycle if you have some gear you are carrying with you. No dogs on the state park beach though! Picture below is at the St Augustine beach to the south of the state park which allows dogs.
St Augustine is a cute little town which has made an effort to preserve their Spanish history. St Augustine was established by the Spanish back in the 1500s and personally I had no idea that Spanish controlled so much of Florida back in the day. The city served as the capital of Spanish Florida for about 200 years before being taken by the British, and then handed back to the Spanish, and then ceded to the United States in the 1800s.
Port Canaveral, FL
November 5 – 19, 2023
After our lucky run of being parked up in beautiful state park campgrounds for over a month, we were returning to the private RV park scene for a couple of weeks at Port Canaveral. We stayed at Jetty Park Campground – a pretty typical packed-in RV park with no privacy and is not exactly our style. But this place had some unique attractions: It is directly across the inlet from Cape Canaveral where NASA and SpaceX launch their rockets from, and it is right on Port Canaveral where there are a half dozen or so cruise ships coming in and out everyday, and it is right on the beach. It really is a unique and enjoyable place to stay for a few weeks.
We were lucky enough to be at Port Canaveral during three rocket launches over the two weeks we were there. The first one we missed – it was after 1 am and while we tried our best to stay up, our usual bedtime is 9:30 pm so we both zonked. Justin woke up to the trailer rocking and rattling as the rocket went overhead and I slept through the entire thing.
The second launch was the best. It was about 8:30 pm (so we were still awake!) but dark enough to easily see it go overhead. The rocket taking off was amazing to see, but it was actually the booster coming back down a couple of minutes later which was the most incredible part. The sound of the booster breaking the sound barrier as it returned to Earth and letting off this enormous sonic boom was something I’ll never forget. The dogs jumped out of their skins!
The third launch was about 4pm in the afternoon. Everyone was gathered at the water’s edge to try and see it but it was so cloudy no one even knew it had taken off until we heard the sound come back at us and it was already long gone by then.
The short story is that, in our experience, two weeks should be enough time for you to see a few rocket launches at Cape Canaveral, but you might want to stay longer than two weeks to see a launch under the right conditions! We certainly got lucky with launch #2!
The cruise ships coming and going at Port Canaveral are really a bit of fun. Firstly – they are HUGE! It’s hard to imagine how they get the things to float upright in the water without toppling over, they look so top-heavy! The ships are parked right next to the campground and when they come in and out of port it looks like they are sailing through the campground. They often have music blaring and everyone on board is partying and yahooing and it’s pretty easy feel like you’re joining in the fun from your campsite.
Jetty Park was where we met Mark and Carol Repogle from Indiana. Mark was wandering past our campsite one morning staring at the ground and looking a bit upset. Justin asked him what was wrong and it turns out he had lost one of his hearing aids (worth $7K!!!) the night before and he was looking for it. Justin of course took on the hunt himself and found the elusive hearing aid about 15 minutes later. Mark was stoked and we subsequently spent a few more nights chatting with Mark and Carol. Mark and Justin are still great buddies on Facebook 🙂
Port Canaveral was also the location we acquired the infamous flag pole which now proudly sits atop our trailer and attracts a lot of attention from other campers (primarily men asking whether we are radio enthusiasts). We had experienced some difficulty with the Starlink reception in the previous months, particularly in West Virginia and Virginia with very high tree canopies, and Justin had decided that a 32 ft flag pole on which to mount the Starlink dish, when required, may be a solution. So he found someone on Marketplace giving one away for free in the Orlando area (about 2 hours from where we were staying) so he disappeared one day and returned with the flag pole atop the truck. It now lives on the top of the caravan to be used in emergency situations.
Jupiter, FL
November 19 – December 3, 2023
Off down the road another couple of hours towards Jupiter and West Palm Beach… on the way to our campsite we stopped at Sebastian Inlet State Park for lunch. Gorgeous little spot with a great campground too (although it only has electric hookups from memory).
Our campground at Jupiter was the Pine Grove Campground at Jonathan Dickinson State Park. Loved it!! The state park is a few miles out of town and the Pine Grove campground has the most enormous, modern sites with full hookups and very nice facilities. They also have some brand new glamping sites if you don’t want to stay in a tent or RV.
I enjoyed experiencing the different style of vegetation in this part of Florida and seems like we had really turned a corner into the sub-tropics. Lots of different types of palms of all different heights, and large broad-leafed bushes that I think are called Sea Grapes.
Jonathan Dickinson has miles and miles of walking and biking trails around the park and an observation tower that provides a great view of the park and surrounding region.
We took some drives down to Palm Beach to gawk at the ridiculously large mansions along the beach (it’s where Donald Trump has his Mar-a-Largo home – the most ugly monstrosity in the area). But we were definitely starting to feel the over-population of Florida in this part of the state – people everywhere, can’t get a park and the beaches don’t allow dogs. So we found a little hidey-hole beach on the inlet not far from our campsite and got a swim in there.
Jonathan Dickinson turn out to be a very social camp. We met Mel parked across the way from us – in his late seventies and has been on the road for 17 years in his Big Horn trailer. He moves from Idaho in the summer to Florida in the winter, with a bit of Texas in between. Then there was Tommy and Lydia who pulled in next door from Boston. New to the RV lifestyle, they had recently retired and kitted themselves out with an F350 dual-axle truck and a brand spanking new Brinkley travel trailer which they were kind enough to give us a full tour of (VERY fancy). And we also met Cage from North Dakota who was doing a bit of travelling before heading to Alaska for work as an ice-road trucker later in the winter! We shared some meals and enjoyed chatting with these people.
Tommy and Lydia gave us two really nice shower heads that came with their new trailer (which they didn’t like and had already installed some new ones). One is now in our trailer shower, and the other is Justin’s outdoor shower. Pretty fancy full rain-maker shower head for an outdoor shower! This ones hangs on the end of the flag pole at the back of the van and Justin made a half-size wooden pallet to stand on so you don’t get mud on your feet. We may have the crappiest looking trailer in most of the parks we visit, but you can’t accuse us of not having a functional one!
Hollywood, FL
December 3 – 10, 2023
Last stop before the Florida Keys – one week in Hollywood in the suburbs of Miami. The KOA Hollywood campground we stayed in was pretty ordinary for the price, but hey, it’s Miami – everything is expensive – and this place was the cheapest we could find.
This was a bit of a hold-over week before starting our journey into the Florida Keys, but I’m really glad we did stop here. Gave a us a bit of a sense of the shear size and population of the Miami area. Every time you get on the road to go somewhere you think will be a 15 minute drive, it takes you 45 minutes (or more). I enjoyed the diversity of this part of southern Florida as well – lots of different nationalities here, particularly Latinos of course – which means there was plenty of good food to be had.
South Beach is a bit of fun. Justin went hunting for his old haunts from his 1998 trip – most of which were still there but of course a lot of gentrification has gone on in the last 25 years! The beach and inlet there is quite nice – no dogs allowed – and the retro buildings along the strip give the place a very unique feel.
our long way home 
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