Last Updated: September 9, 2026
For nine years we left Florida in April and drove north. It was never a casual decision. April is when the country’s severe weather season is at its most violent across the Deep South, and we were crossing it in a house we had to tow. The worry came back every single spring, and it was the one part of the calendar we never fully solved.
We went anyway, and the reason was flowers. Leaving the Gulf coast in April and working slowly northwest meant traveling inside the spring itself — redbud and magnolia and fruit blossom in the southern states, then daffodils and tulips, then the woodland flowers coming up through last year’s leaves: bloodroot, trillium, jack-in-the-pulpit, mayapple. Keep moving north at the right pace and spring never ends. It takes four to six weeks to get from Florida to the Rockies at three hours of driving a day, which is how we traveled, and that put us into the mountains just as their spring was starting. Yellowstone’s RV parks open around the end of May. The Canadian parks open mid-May into June. It all lines up.
Here is the part we only understood properly much later. The thing that made the April departure worth it — the bloom moving north — is driven by exactly the same machinery that makes April dangerous. Warmth pushes north out of the Gulf, the jet stream follows it, and the boundary between the two is where both the wildflowers and the tornadoes are. We were not traveling near the severe weather season. We were traveling with it, at about the same speed, for six weeks, every year.
What follows is how we actually handled that, and everything else the sky did to us over nine years: wind, snow, cold, heat, hail and hurricane season. Some of it is what we got right. Some of it is just luck, and we should say so plainly at the start — in nine years we were never once in a situation where we had to take shelter from a tornado. That is not a technique. It is mostly the result of being unwilling to drive on days other people drove.
