The Tour Must Go Home?
By the time we completed our STATE 36: MISSISSIPPI project, it was mid-December. We could have either found a camp spot or two in our next project state of Alabama, which was planned to happen just after the New Year, or we could drive back to Florida to spend our second straight Christmas in Lakeland, where some of my aunts and uncles had Winter cottages in a development that was also an RV resort. Since we were only a day’s drive away, and there was extra room for both Kendra and my parents to fly down and visit, we decided it was worth the extra effort to spend Christmas and New Year with family around us and in familiar territory.
We stayed overnight in Montgomery, Alabama, to continue our Civil Rights educational tour by visiting the extremely powerful and moving Legacy Museum and Memorial for Peace and Justice — but we’ll save those experiences for our STATE 38: ALABAMA post. We made one more overnight stay in a Walmart parking lot, which isn’t unusual for us in between locations, before arriving at our favorite historic city in Florida: St. Augustine.
We loved our first stay in St. Augustine the year before so much that we came back to do it all again at Anastasia State Park. The beauty of this park is that it doesn’t have WiFi, you’re secluded with lush jungle on all three sides (and a tree canopy above), and it’s a short walk to the ocean — how could it get any better?
After going hard on the tour nonstop for the past several months, we were ready for a few days to live unplugged. We were able to have some quiet time to read, sleep in, enjoy breakfast outside, have a glass of wine and brainstorm on the hammock, hang out with each other and Noel, and I even tried my hand at Sashiko embroidery, an ancient method of stitching that was not easy to learn at first with the instructions only written in Japanese.
We could only stay a few nights and had to move to another spot for one of them because these sites get booked months and months in advance — we were fortunate even to find an open spot so last minute. We had better luck reserving spots in another Florida state park across the state on the Gulf side: Fort De Soto Park. Since we were headed to Lakeland anyway, it wasn’t much of a detour. Plus, it was much cheaper to stay here than at any other RV park in Florida this time of year (Yay for state parks!)
Fort De Soto is comprised of a string of five islands just southwest of St. Petersburg. The Tocobaga Native Americans inhabited it until the 1500s when Spanish explorers eventually took control. During the Civil War, it was held by the Union Army as part of their blockade efforts against Confederate supply ships into Tampa Bay. It wasn’t built up into a military fort until the Spanish-American War in 1898 and wasn’t used again after World War I. But then the U.S. Army Air Force repurchased it in 1938 and recommissioned it into a bombing range until after World War II. It was eventually converted into a county park in the 1960s, with the 12-inch defense mortars and 6-inch naval guns left for the public to admire while they take long walks on the beach.
Kendra discovered her new favorite activity: sea shell hunting. She spent the cloudy afternoons and many mornings waking up to walk the Gulf coast on a mission. Her best haul (not pictured below) came the morning after a massive storm hit Florida.
We’d never experienced such a heavy tropical storm before, and we watched nervously throughout the day as the flood waters kept creeping closer and closer to our campsite. The storm even produced a few tornadoes inland, including in Lakeland, where we were heading next. Thankfully, we didn’t suffer any damage and woke up the following day only to find tree branches and debris scattered around our campsite and campground.
Of course, the day we needed to pack up and head onward, it was sunny and beautiful. The campsites back into a thin layer of mangroves that border the Mullet Key Bayou, a protected area of water and islands that buffer Tampa Bay from the Gulf of Mexico. As a neighboring camper paddled away from their campsite, we had to begin loading ours. We quickly noticed that staying this close to salt water left a matte, salty residue on everything, including our Airstream.
Since it was finally a sunny day, we weren’t quite ready to leave the coast for the last time on our tour. We had to leave our campsite by 11 AM, so we brought our Airstream to the beach with us. We found an open parking lot area, left Noel in the trailer with its windows open to catch the fresh ocean breeze, and enjoyed one last walk along the beach.
That afternoon we made it to Sanlan RV & Golf Resort in Lakeland, our Florida home away from home. I grew up vacationing here as a kid growing up after my grandparents bought a small place here in 1988. My parents, with their four kids, would make the 20+ hour drive most Winters or Spring Breaks to spend quality time with our grandparents in the sun riding through trails, eating fresh strawberries, and going to the local flea market.
After my grandparents passed, my aunts and uncles carried the torch, and each bought a little Winter cottage on the same street. Last Winter, we were here for Christmas and the New Year before our STATE 15: FLORIDA project in Miami. Last year, Kendra’s parents flew down to visit us, and this year, both sets of our parents were able to make the trip.
We enjoyed ‘gator hunting through the trails, golf cart rides around the park, game nights and home-cooked meals, some sun time at the pool, and even a round of golf with my dad and father-in-law.
After our parents flew home to wintery Michigan, Kendra and I celebrated the New Year with our annual goals. First on both of our lists was: Complete the 50 States tour. A few days later, as we were leaving Florida to resume the tour at our next project, we received a call from my co-founding partner of [HAS HEART], Michael Hyacinthe. Our funds were quickly running dry, and the additional support we worked towards building wasn’t coming in as we had hoped.
There was no way we could afford to keep going.
We put all we had into this tour. We sold my condo, quit our jobs, leased a truck, and financed our Airstream. After over a year of planning and raising enough funds for [HAS HEART] to get the project started, we believed the final round of support would come through while we were on the road to completing our nationwide mission of giving Veterans in every state their creative voice for the first time. We found out along the way that researching and planning projects and travel routes, building and maintaining a website and social media accounts, and fundraising on the road was A LOT of work for two people.
We spent the next few days hammering away at the numbers, emailing partners, participants, and potential brand sponsors.
While we were working away to find a solution, the owner of Sanlan graciously let us move to a campsite for free for a week. But even with that extra time, there was no immediate support in sight, so we had to make the tough decision to pause and postpone the tour until we could secure the funding needed to complete the mission.
Our most economical option was to store the trailer here and drive back to Michigan to fundraise the remaining $100,000 needed to finish the tour. We took the final few days to prepare the trailer for storage, a process in and of itself. Luckily, we could do it at Sanlan, where I could borrow tools from my relatives, many of which previously belonged to my Grandpa Dawson and Grandma Jo.
We made the 19+ hour drive up to Michigan in one day, pulling into Kendra’s parents’ driveway after midnight just as the first snowflakes of a historic Arctic polar vortex storm were falling. It was a harsh new reality while we tried to figure out a way to complete our nationwide mission for [HAS HEART].
