The Great Southern Adventure: St. Augustine & Accidentally Sleeping in a Graveyard
822 out of 4,074 total miles traveled so far
Days 8-9 on our roadtrip across the United States where we make it all the way to The Atalantic!
Florida was a dreamsicle portion of the trip.
April 29, Day 8
We woke up in Mississippi at one of our infamous free campsites we got off the internet, and stopped for gas and a cooler re-fill on our way back to the gulf line.
The following describes the entire contents of our cooler, which we have yet to put any actual ice in on this trip:
The essentials
Whole Wheat Bread
Multigrain Wraps
Mustard
Old Fashioned Oats
Peanut Butter
Peanuts
Apples
Lettuce
Dark Chocolate
Chocolate Chip Cookies from home (which we are now out of, sadly!)
And last but not least, the best discovery of our camping education, flavored tuna packets!
It’s like canned tuna but it comes in little vacuum-sealed bags and it has spices added. We stocked up on a dozen different flavors such as Lemon Pepper, Chipotle, and Spicy Thai. These are amazing because they aren’t perishable and they are one of the cleanest sources of protein at the best price. Each packet has a sandwich’s portion of meat and costs a dollar or less per pouch. They don’t make a mess and they make a super fast and utensil free sammy! We usually add thin sliced apples and lettuce to give it some extra crunch and nutrients.
Snack break at Mo’ Bay Beignet Co
We have overnight oats with peanuts and peanut butter every morning, a picnic lunch, and then we buy a pastry and one hot meal for other points of the day. We try to throw in a cucumber or fresh strawberries in there too to keep the innards happy after so long on the road.
But back to getting to dreamy Florida. We walked around Mobile, Alabama (They pronounce it Mo-Beeeel) and got some killer coffee and beignets from Mo’ Bay Beignet Co. These were a little tougher than the Louisiana ones we’d tried but wonderful in their way.
Back home one of our favorite car games is Homeless, or Hipster? We get a kick out of how much money people spend in Oregon to look homeless in the name of Hipster fashion. Greasy hair and beat up flannels by way of $60 hair product and $200 ripped up “vintage” jackets are all the rage. This trip has really given us a taste of our own judgmental medicine though, because we must look SO homeless all the time.
Time for a mustache trim!
For example, by this point in our journey, Alex’s mustache was getting way out of control. We bought some tiny scissors at Walmart that morning so after our snack break we sat on the curb and I trimmed his whiskers, which happened to be somewhat full of powdered sugar, by the way. I can’t imagine what passersby must have thought!
Homeless, or Hipster??
Then we drove the gulf line until we got to Florida. We made some stops at a few state parks and even an antique Emporium to stretch our legs and take in some fresh scenery.
We were in a hurry to get to St. Augustine, but we rolled into Tallahassee for dinner. I found a Caribbean street food restaurant called Pineappétit and we ordered the second stuffed pineapple of the trip and two different empanadas.
This restaurant has been one of my favorite finds from the trip. The whole vibe from the peppy island decor to the colorful and creative menu items added up to feel so happy and fun. Every little detail from the colors to the textures and every burst of flavor made you want to dance to the upbeat tunes blasting at just the right frequency.
It was dark by the time we got to St. Augustine, so we camped along the highway outside of town. This was the only time our free campsites website let us down. We drove out there thinking we would be camping on the beach again, but it turned out to be more of a swampy area next to a busy road completely loaded with chiggers.
What are chiggers, you may ask? Well, they are little tiny gnat-like demon bugs that burrow into your skin and leave bites that itch for days and days. Of course, we didn’t know that at the time so we thought they were just little harmless fruit flies. We made the fatal mistake of leaving a window cracked in the Subaru, which led to us being nearly devoured by morning. All night we were tossing and turning and trying to swat the little monsters away, and by morning we were not quite as rosy and cheery as we had envisioned going into our fabulous beach day.
April 30, Day 9
The itching hadn’t quite set in so we were still in okay spirits. My friend Bryce lives in the St. Augustine area and had sent me a great curated list of places for Alex and me to check out. We started the day with a dip in De Leon Springs.
Soaking up some sun before a dip in De Leon Springs.
The natural clear spring was once a bustling resort destination and made famous by its “fountain of youth” that people used to travel far and wide to sip from in the late 1800s. The banks have been cemented over to create a perfect round swimming pool edge that is bordered on one side by a waterfall that flows into the surrounding Spring Garden Lake.
We stayed for an hour or more, basking in the sun and taking in the sounds of happy children and the smell of bacon coming from the little poolside restaurant.
One could easily spend a day there, but we were excited to get to the beach and walk around St. Augustine, which happens to be the oldest city in America. We shared a Caribbean rice bowl from a food truck on the marina and then split a little meat pie from an Australian coffee shop downtown.
The college looked like a castle straight out of a fairytale, and the cute, narrow old town, was likewise very European feeling. It was a Sunday, so unfortunately we weren’t the only tourists out and about, so we walked around a bit but ultimately made our way to Anastasia Beach where we had planned to lay in the sand and do our first bit of relaxing on the trip.
That’s not how it happened though!
Anastasia Beach, Image from “Coastal Things” on Youtube
We took one toe-dip into the warm Florida water and it was only a matter of minutes before we were full-on body surfing. The water was much warmer than the spring we’d dipped into earlier, so this felt beyond luxurious.
We waded out to our armpits and bobbed in the salt water until a giant wave would come rolling our way. Then we would either jump over it and let it lift us into the air or if it was too big to jump you could dive into it and bob up on the other side of it or lay into it and let it carry you to the shore. Alex developed a few different backflips and summersaults that worked a lot better with the extra foot of height he has on me.
We spent the entire afternoon body surfing until we were both brined lobsters. Alex was convinced that he needed to be buried in the sand, so I obliged and turned my lobster into a beached sand crab.
We will just say that the locals, who were wearing hoodies and chilling under umbrellas, could tell we weren’t from here.
The day got away from us so before we knew it we were back in the Subaru heading North towards Georgia. Dinner was an epic second stop at Buc-ee’s for the brisket sandwich! We stopped in Jacksonville to ride the elevated trolly through town, but it was closed so we did an abbreviated walking tour along the river.
Jacksonville, FL
A couple was playing Uno that I took a photo for. It turns out that it was their first date, so I hope the photo I took makes it into the wedding slide show one day! On our way back to the car we visited the Treaty Tree, which was the city’s 250-year-old live oak tree.
My grandmother loves trees and is still the best tree climber I know, so I always think of her when I come across a good tree. This one towered higher than some of the little church steeples in town and could have filled the inside of one with its gnarled and twisting branches. You got the feeling that every secret ever told under the canopy of its branches was remembered and ingrained in its ancient limbs and yours for the keeping if you could only decipher the whispering of its leaves.
The branches were so heavy that they had grown back into the ground and down again in multiple places. It made me a tinge proud for my species for recognizing that a treasure like this, although on valuable land that could make millions commercially, is sacred enough to let live on for hundreds more years to come.
I’m sure there is much more to see and do in Jacksonville, but the Treaty Tree was by far my favorite.
We set over the Georgia border with the sun and could make out the pastel marshes along the highway as they faded from pink to blue, and finally black.
After a full day in the water and 12 miles of walking, we were both set on a hot shower. We found a free campsite online with hot showers, but this was a case of getting what you pay for.
We rolled in around 10 PM and found a good spot that was far from the street lights but not too close to the lake. We’d learned our lesson the night before about stagnate water and bugs and were careful to put a little distance between us and the bugs this time.
I am a farm girl and have lived and bathed in some pretty questionable places, but even I was squeamish of the public showers at this campsite. The good news was that everyone else camped there had campers and was hooked up to water, so we had the place to ourselves.
For once the women’s side was much worse than the men's side. The walls and floors had a pinkish tint to them that I know from the fore-mentioned questionable showers to be a very special brand of unsanitary and the room smelled like it had been used by the campers to clean their catch from the river.
I decided to identify as a man for the time being and let Alex, the real man in the situation, turn on the faucet, pull the curtain, and hand me the soap so I didn’t have to touch anything like a proper princess. It's called selective sexism. That side didn’t have nearly the color to it and just smelled like a bathroom, which I never thought would measure as better than an alternative.
Someone had dropped their soap and not even bothered to retrieve it for fear of getting too close to that floor. The soap was a small price to pay…
It wasn’t the Roosevelt Hotel, but saltwater and wind had made us sleepy in the way it usually does in all of your best childhood memories and we had a pretty even coating of sand all over. The hot water was actually… bliss. I’d be lying though if I said I wasn’t thinking about how glad I was that I’d opted for platform sandals at that moment that could put as much distance between me and the slimy floor as possible.
We didn’t crack the window that night. We crawled into our bed in the back of the car all warm and relaxed but with one more important task. Alex shone a light up on the roof of the car and I went to work on skeeter squishing duty. I smashed away in the massacre of the year because after the night before there was no way we were going to sleep with a single bug in our cocoon.
When there wasn’t a buzz to be heard and the roof was covered in mosquito guts, we went to sleep.
May 1, Day 10
The swampy campground we’d camped in was pretty magical to wake up in. Spanish moss hung in a canopy above us and the sunrise on the water was warm and welcoming of the new day.
A dozen other parties were camping in the park but we had our corner to ourselves. When we got out of the car to find a smattering of wooden crosses around us we realized the reason we had our privacy was that we had somehow parked in the graveyard section of the campground. I’m sorry for our mistake, but since WHEN were there graveyards in campgrounds, and more importantly, WHY would you need a graveyard in a campground, and should we be worried??
We decided to move along without breakfast and certainly without showers.
After successfully getting away without becoming citizens of the graveyard or dying instantly from any creepy shower diseases some appetite came back to us and we went off in search of some good Georgia peaches now that we were into the Georgia section of our cross-country playlist.
We pulled up to “Georgia Peach World” in the middle of Justin Bieber, right after Jim Croce.
As it turns out, we were a little early in the season for fresh peaches, but we did sample some peach cider and were able to ooh and ahh at all the ways to dry, pickle, preserve, chutney, juice, candy, syrup, and dressing a peach.
Florida was pretty dreamy with her beach houses, white sand, and warm water. Georgia was an adventure already, but we knew it had some dream factor in store for us too with our next destination of Savannah.
Up next: Savannah & Charleston
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