Inspiring travel stories, tips, and guides from a couple exploring the world one destination at a time.
Last Updated: August 2, 2026
Hanna Park is about 450 acres of mature coastal hammock at Mayport, in the Jacksonville Beaches area of northeast Florida. Its full name is Kathryn Abbey Hanna Park, and the name is worth pausing on rather than skimming past — more on her in a moment. Winthrop Bancroft donated the first five oceanfront acres to the City of Jacksonville in 1967 on the condition that the park carry her name; the city bought up adjoining land and the park opened in 1972.
Last Updated: August 2, 2026
White Springs grew up around a sulphur spring, and the spring has a longer history than the town. The Suwannee River here was the boundary between the territory of the Timucua to the east and the Apalachee to the west, and the spring on its bank was regarded as sacred healing ground — neutral territory where even nations at war observed a truce in order to bathe in it. Spanish explorers recorded the custom. Later the Americans built on it: Bryant Sheffield put up a hotel and a spring house in 1836, a multi-storey bathhouse followed, and White Springs became, by most accounts, Florida’s first tourist attraction. The town was a refuge during the Civil War. The spring eventually stopped flowing — by around 1990 it was finished — and the surrounding country never developed the way the rest of Florida did. What is left is the river, and the quiet.
Last Updated: August 2, 2026
St. Augustine is called the Nation’s Oldest City, and the claim holds up with one careful qualification. Founded in 1565 by the Spanish admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, it is the oldest continuously inhabited European-established settlement in the mainland United States. San Juan, Puerto Rico is older still, founded in 1521. Either way, St. Augustine was already two generations old when the English landed at Jamestown. Spain ceded Florida to the United States under the Adams-Onís Treaty, signed in 1819 and taking effect in 1821; St. Augustine served as capital of the Florida Territory until 1824, when the seat of government moved to Tallahassee — chosen, sensibly enough, as the midpoint between here and Pensacola.
Last Updated: August 1, 2026
Williston was only an hour from Grand Oaks Resort, and this was our first time staying in this part of Florida’s heartland. We came specifically because it is close to Gainesville — and because after a month of coastline we wanted to see what the interior looked like.
Last Updated: August 1, 2026
The Grand Oaks Resort is an RV park inside a working equestrian center — 400 acres at Weirsdale, Florida, just southeast of Ocala and a few minutes from Lady Lake and The Villages. We had stayed at this part of central Florida before and enjoyed it, so we came back for a week. From Ormond Beach it was only about a ninety-minute drive. We arrived to find a combined driving competition underway, which turned a pleasant week into a memorable one.
Last Updated: August 1, 2026
Ormond Beach sits on Florida’s Atlantic coast just north of Daytona Beach. We have stayed a little further north at Flagler Beach before and liked the stretch, so we came back to it. This time the weather had other ideas. A bitter, windy, wet storm sat on us for most of the week and we got perhaps two days of sunshine out of seven. We lost the daily beach walks we had been looking forward to — but we were given something else instead: a dramatic, grey, heaving Atlantic in full winter temper, twenty feet from where we were sitting. We never did get a photograph that did it justice. The day below was the nicest one we had.
