A road trip to Florida includes another cool national park

Took a two-week road trip to Florida, which is to say I loaded up a very old truck camper onto my 22-year-old truck and hoped for the best. I know engines don’t have souls, but the Cummins 12-valve seemed to actually enjoy the experience, humming along at 1,800 rpms, which amounted to 65 mph. Not exactly a land speed record, for sure, but it got us there, and, more importantly, got us back, without so much as burning a quarter-quart of oil.

Not bad for a rig that now has 288,964 miles.

The trip down was about 2,750 miles and the trip back was about 2,964 miles. On the way back, we drove through rural Florida and Alabama, avoiding the Interstates. I will never say anything bad about Alabama again. I have zero affection for the Lynryd Skynyrd tune — hate it, in fact, but Alabama was a gorgeous state, with rolling verdant fields and farms.

On the way down, the weather was good, but on the way up, we had to dodge the big snowstorm in South Dakota and severe thunderstorms in Arkansas and Oklahoma. But we did not escape bad weather. Big winds in Chugwater, Wyoming, grounded us for about four hours one afternoon and the next morning we drove through a pretty good snow squall.

Missing South Dakota on the way back was unfortunate, because on the way down we stopped at Badlands National Park and wanted to stop there on the way back. Badlands is a gorgeous park, far prettier than I expected, and it was full of bighorn sheep.

The whole purpose of this trip was to visit my mother, who lives in a gated community in Ormond Beach, which is just outside of Daytona. I didn’t know my mother’s community had a gate until we arrived and a woman with a thick KGB-like accent greeted me at the entrance, my filthy truck looking decidedly out of place. I gave her my driver’s license and she grudgingly handed me a week-long pass.

We helped mom around the house, went to the beach, and I wandered around a Florida swamp a couple of times hoping to see an alligator. I saw a lot of cool lizards (lizards are everywhere), several big snakes, crabs, various birds we don’t have in the West, including cardinals and mockingbirds, and even a great horned owl, which seemed a bit ironic, considering we do have them in the West, but you don’t see them much, since they’re largely nocturnal.

I saw all that stuff an much more, but I didn’t get to see a wild alligator, which was the goal.

The most impressive creature was a plant — huge live oaks, draped in moss, living in a state park wedged between the ocean and suburbia. The sign at the trailhead said it was the “old Florida.”

My kind of place and all the more reason to go back.

Chris Peterson is the editor of the Hungry Horse News. His column appears frequently in the Hungry Horse News.