Pensacola

It was tough to leave Grayton Beach, but we eventually tore ourselves away to continue our trip. Our next stop was in the Pensacola area to visit my former nanny, Claudia. We got to her house at around 5pm, and after saying our hellos, she and her boyfriend Frank whisked us away to Bands on the Beach. Bands on the Beach is an outdoor music event that's held every Tuesday night at Pensacola Beach. They have a different band playing every week, and hundreds of people show up toting lawn chairs and coolers full of tasty snacks and drinks. They also have a bar that serves Bushwackers, a Pensacola drink that's made with vanilla ice cream, half and half, Bacardi 151, Kahlua, creme de cacao, and coconut cream. You can order it with an extra shot of rum (which we obviously did), and barely even taste the liquor. It just tastes like a slightly alcoholic vanilla milkshake.

Claudia and me with our Bushwackers

Definitely not a low-calorie beverage.

The next day, Claudia and I spent the afternoon visiting various antique shops, and finding some interesting treasures...

Looking  at you, Gomez.

That night, we all watched the movie "RV" with Robin Williams. Have any of you seen it? It's a comedy about a dad who takes his family on an RV road trip and everything goes wrong for them. It's kind of cheesy, but also pretty funny, and Josh and I could relate to a lot of things that happened to the main character.
Before we left, Claudia snapped a cute family photo of me, Josh, and Gomez in front of Ol' Tilly.

Grayton Beach State Park

It was 4th of July eve and Josh and I were stressed. Part of the appeal of this trip was being able to go wherever we wanted, whenever we wanted, and stay for however long we wanted. Because of this, we never book activities or campsites more than 1 day in advance. In fact, we book pretty much everything same-day, about an hour or two before we get there. What we gain in freedom, we lose in stability, and there we were, the night before the biggest summer holiday in the US, with nowhere to spend the night.
After calling around, Josh found a random state park along our route with 1 campsite available for a single night. Not wanting to risk having to sleep on the side of the road, we decided to take the spot. So began our stay at the most wonderful beach campground that has ever existed.
Grayton Beach State Park looks like this:

Literally paradise. After our first night, by some miracle, we were able to book two more nights. Great! We had a place to stay for the whole long weekend. 4th of July came and went (more on that tomorrow), and we decided to book another night. Then another. Then another. Altogether, we stayed 6 nights at this incredible park. We did have to change spots a couple times, but it wasn't that much of a hassle. The 6 days we spent there consisted of morning walks on the beach, afternoon snorkeling, dinner cookouts back at the campsite, evening beach lounging, and nighttime s'mores by the fire, peppered with trips to the neighboring town of Seaside for coffee and shopping.

Beach bummin'

I don't think we could have possibly had a better time here, and it has definitely been one of our favorite stops on the trip so far.

For more timely updates on what we're up to, follow us on Instagram @tillyandlovebug. I post 1-3 pictures a day of our trip.

Panama City Beach

Panama City Beach is a gorgeous beach town that's an extremely popular spring break destination for Southern college students. In fact, it's nicknamed the "Spring Break Capital of the World". The boys and I didn't participate in too many raucous activities, though shit did get real when we found Gomez's mini-me at the restaurant where we stopped for lunch:

Gomez and Smaller Gomez.

For dinner, we went to Schooner's, a local beachfront restaurant, and then took a romantic sunset stroll on the beach. My phone died so I didn't get any pictures of the romantic stroll, but here's Josh enjoying a drink with dinner.

Overall, Panama City Beach was OK, but definitely not interesting enough to warrant staying a second night.

Suwannee River

Our next stop after Gainesville was the Suwannee River Hideaway Campground, where we stayed for one glorious night. This is a campground that mostly caters to snowbirds, so it unfortunately closes for most of the Summer. Our timing was perfect, however, and we snagged a spot a few days before it closed its gates.
Right behind our campsite there was an elevated boardwalk that led over a swamp to the Suwannee River. It looked like a magical pathway to Fairyland, so we followed it to the end.

Once we got to the river, Josh decided to take Gomez for a swim. The little guy is a Bichon Frise/Cocker Spaniel mix, both of which are supposed to be water-loving dogs. Gomez, however, was terrified of the river, and didn't enjoy the swimming lesson one bit.

So Gomez isn't a water dog. At least he makes a great dash-puppy.

Gainesville

After Rainbow Springs State Park, we stopped in Gainesville for a few days to visit our friends, Joe and Lauren, and their son, Joey. The last time we saw them was during our stay at Bonnet Creek in Orlando, when they drove down to spend a night with us.
Gainesville is located in Central Florida, about 2 hours north of Orlando. It is home to the University of Florida, and is the birthplace of Gatorade. It also had a really cool downtown area. Read more about Gainesville here.
We set up camp for several days on the street outside of their house, and spent our time there hanging out in their backyard and exploring the aforementioned cool downtown area. On one particularly hot day, we played a game called Splash Zone, which is kind of like softball, except with water balloons. And no bases or points. So basically someone throws a water balloon at the batter, who smashes it with at bat (or a shovel, if you don't have a bat) and gets everyone soaking wet.

We also got to spend time at a few cool local restaurants, including The Top, Loosey's, and the Lunch Box, all of which had nice ambiances and good food.

Poor Gomez was looking haggard after walking several miles to Loosey's on his tiny stub legs.

Creamed corn nuggets, fried pickles, and shrimp at The Top. The corn nuggets were the highlight of the meal.

We also went tubing at Ginnie Springs, but I didn't take any pictures. I've always wanted to tube down a river, so I was pretty pumped. It was beautiful.

On our last day there, they took us to La Tienda for delicious Mexican food, then on a short nature hike to a creek nearby.

Joe and Joey wading in the creek

Rainbow Springs State Park

Last week, we spent one night at Rainbow Springs State Park in Dunnellon, Florida. It was absolutely beautiful! The park had nice waterfalls and a gorgeous spring to swim in.

One of several small waterfalls we saw

This woman had the right idea. She outfitted her kayak with a giant beach umbrella.

Since school is out for the Summer, there were a bunch of kids swimming around in the spring. This was surprising to me, considering there's a huge warning sign next to the entrance:


Yikes!

Fortunately, no alligators showed up. The water was the clearest I've ever seen, and though it was very cold and very deep (two things that I generally don't like), I thoroughly enjoyed swimming in it.

#Laterpost: Sanibel Island

Before we got to Fort Meyers, we spend two nights on Sanibel Island. Sanibel is just off the coast of Fort Meyers beach, and is roughly 33 square miles. It's known mainly for the thousands of beautiful shells that wash up onto its beaches every day. At low tide, you can find hundreds of people combing the shore for all different types of shells, including conch, clam, snail, and mussel. Here are a few beauties I found on our first night.

Low tide was at 8:15 PM when we were there, so the lighting was not great. Also, these are all iPhone photos. I briefly misplaced my camera lens cap, and didn't want to risk damaging the lens, so I left the camera in the RV during our time in Sanibel.

Josh hunting for shells.

On our only full day on the island, we decided to visit the JN "Ding" Darling National Wildlife preserve, hoping to see some cool animals. We took the Love Bug all throughout the preserve and noticed that the other visitors all had fishing poles and coolers full of ice. I think the powers that be meant to name it the "JN Darling National Fishing Park", but the brochures got misprinted at Kinkos, so they decided to roll with "wildlife preserve" instead. Seriously, though, what the hell kind of wildlife preserve lets you hunt the animals?
Besides the other visitors, the only wildlife we saw was one raccoon.

None of you are safe!

After the raccoon preserve, we took the Love Bug to a different beach on the other side of the island, where we found more beautiful shells.

Shells on shells on shells.

We finished the day at a great Italian restaurant across the street from our RV resort called Matzaluna. All in all, our little mini trip to Sanibel was nice, albeit kind of boring. Instead of going back, I think I'd prefer to spend more time in Naples.

Naples

Yesterday, Josh and I spent a lovely afternoon exploring the beautiful city of Naples. Naples is a wealthy beach city on the Western coast of Florida that has tons of good shopping and restaurants.

It also had an abundance of species of tropical flowers. Much to Josh's annoyance, I insisted on stopping to photograph most of them.  "You should start a new blog," he teased, "'Flowers of Southern Florida'. I'm sure at least three people would read it." Little jerk is lucky I love him so much.

We left Tilly in an empty parking lot (as we often do, since RV parking doesn't grow on trees) and headed for Naples pier.

The pier gave us a spectacular view of the Gulf, the beach, and...

DOLPHINS!!

Much like the oxen I discussed in my Colonial Williamsburg post, I had never seen a real live dolphin in the wild before. They come up to the surface every so often to breathe, making a loud hacking noise as if they've smoked 3 packs of cigarettes every day for the past ten years. Besides that, though, they're super cute.

Naples Beach, from the pier.

It got pretty hot after we got off the pier, so we walked back to Tilly on the beach. There were a ton of people out, and it was nice to see everyone playing in the water and hanging out in the sand. This time last year, I went to Plum Island Beach in Massachusetts with two of my friends, and the water was so cold you couldn't go in past your ankles without turning into a human icicle. Here, the water feels like a comfortable bath. I love Florida!

No icicles here.

Key West

We had an amazing (though way too damn short) time in Miami Beach. I will try to share more about that part of the trip later, but as for right now, please admire our amazing campsite for the next three nights in Key West:

Oh, you think RV parks are trashy? Our private dock begs to differ.

Our site is right on the water, which made for some perfect night swimming.

Josh made a new fish friend.

Miami Beach: Day 1

We are staying in Miami Beach for a couple of day with Josh's friend Noam and his family. They have an extra apartment in the back of their house that they rent out via AirBNB and it happened to be vacant for the next few days, so they awesomely are letting us take it over. Noam is a private flight attendant, so he travels all the time. He had to leave early this morning to catch a flight, so we unfortunately won't see him again on this trip.

Josh and Noam

This morning I had my first experience with Cuban coffee. Cuban coffee, or cafe Cubano, is a shot of espresso with a ton of raw sugar added in while it's brewing. Espresso and sugar are two of my favorite things, so I enjoyed this immensely. After I finished my 6th lap around the block I considered going back in for another, but decided against it.

Where was this when I was in college?

I also went for a nice long walk around Miami Beach. I had been here once before a few years ago and not much has changed since then. I liked it then and I like it now. I came by myself and stayed in a hostel in South Beach. It was one of the best trips I've ever taken. Traveling alone is a lot of fun, though I do enjoy the company of the travel buddies I have on this trip.

The beach is seriously perfect here. Perfect sand, perfect water that's somehow blue and clear at the same time, and it's always the perfect temperature. I love it.