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Florida Keys

2026-04-07 by Martin

We spent 10-days in the Florida Keys during March 2026, staying at the Sugarloaf Key RV Resort about 20 miles north of Key West. This was the high-season for staying in the Keys, and we had booked a long way in advance to secure the 10-day stay.

We traveled to the Keys from the Encore Miami Everglades RV Resort, and enjoyed the trip down the US-1 Highway which is known as the Overseas Highway once it starts its journey through the Keys. The highway follows a series of causeways and bridges as it makes its way through the Keys. The most famous bridge being the “7-mile Bridge” about half-way along the Overseas Highway. The current highway parallels an earlier section of highway for most of the way. Various sections of the old highway have been converted into bike and pedestrian trails, and fishing piers. Partway along the 7-mile Bridge we passed Fred the Tree, a wild-growing celebrity Casuarina tree. Fred the Tree is often referred to as a sign of hope and the resilience of the people in the Florida Keys due to its ability to thrive in such harsh conditions on a concrete bridge, while surviving a number of hurricanes and extreme weather events.

The Sugarloaf Key RV Resort is a very nice (and expensive!) RV park with a pool, cafe, bar, boat launch, marina, and sandy beach. During our stay we launched our inflatable paddle board and kayak from the boat launch and enjoyed a few hours paddling through the mangroves islands along the coast of Sugarloaf Key. We also spent some time relaxing on the sandy beach, and Allen enjoyed swimming in the Ocean.

During our stay we made two visits to Key West using the Lower Keys Transit public bus that only cost $1 each way and saved us from having to find and pay for expensive parking had we driven. There was a bus stop on the Overseas Highway just outside the RV park. On our first bus trip we found that the buses don’t really follow the posted time-table, and we waited a long time for the next bus. After this we discovered the Lower Keys Transit app that shows actual bus locations and estimated arrival times at each stop and made our subsequent bus trips easier to plan. The ride into Key West took about an hour because the bus stops at the Key West transit depot along the way for the drivers to take a break while the passengers wait for the trip to continue. The trip back from Key West was about 40-minutes as the bus travels direct without the transit depot stop.

On our first visit to Key West, we walked from downtown Key West to the Fort Zachary Taylor Historic State Park. Along the way we walked past the Truman Little White House. The Harry S. Truman Little White House was the winter White House for President Harry S. Truman for 175 days during 11 visit and was used for various federal government purposes until its conversion into a museum in 1987.

Construction of Fort Zachary Taylor began in 1845 as part of a mid-19th century plan to defend the southeast coast of the United States through a series of forts after the War of 1812. During the Civil War it became a key outpost for threatening blockade runners during the Union blockade. The fort was heavily used again during the Spanish–American War (1898), World War I (1917–1918), World War II (1941–1945), and the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962). In 1976, Fort Zachery Taylor was donated to the State of Florida and opened up to the public in 1985. We enjoyed wandering through the Fort and up onto the ramparts. We particularly enjoyed walking through the red-brick arches and corridors housing the cannons and gun ports.

For our second visit to Key West, we decided to take the Old Town Trolley tour of the city. This is a hop-on hop-off narrated tour bus that travels all around the city with the driver providing interesting facts and history throughout the trip. The entire trip lasted 90-minutes and we learned a lot along the way from our driver Karl. After the Trolley tour we enjoyed lunch at the Two Friends Patio Restaurant on Front Street near Mallory Square on the north end of Key West before traveling back to our RV Park on the bus.

Our 10-day visit to the Keys was an ideal amount of time to enjoy the area and make a couple of visits to Key West. The weather was very good during our visit with temperatures on the high side for the time of year. There is something for everyone in Key West with a variety of historical sites as well as a good number of restaurants, bars, and stores throughout the town.

Below is a selection of photos from our trip to the Keys. Click on the thumbnails for the full size pictures.

St. Augustine, Florida

2026-02-09 by Martin

Founded in 1565 by Spanish settlers, St. Augustine it is the oldest continuously inhabited European-established settlement in what is now the contiguous United States. The city served as the capital of Spanish Florida for over 200 years. It became the capital of British East Florida in 1763 and continued as the capital after the 1783 Treaty of Versailles in the Second Spanish Period. Spain ceded Florida to the United States in 1819, and St. Augustine was designated one of the two alternating capitals of the Florida Territory, the other being Pensacola, upon ratification of the Adams–Onís Treaty in 1821. The territorial government moved and made Tallahassee the permanent capital of Florida in 1824.

We visited St. Augustine, Florida on New Years Day 2026 while staying at the Encore Bulow RV Resort near Flagler Beach about an hour away. It was busy in Saint Augustine that day, and we were happy that we had booked the hop-on-hop-off Old Town Trolley tour which allowed us to park remotely and take the shuttle around town at our own pace. The St. Augustine trolley tour has over 20 stops, is 8.5 miles long, and takes about 90 minutes from start to finish if you were just to stay on the trolley bus. Another benefit of the Trolley tour is that the drivers provide commentary and historical information on the city as you travel around.

Our first stop was to visit Castillo de San Marcos, the oldest masonry fort in the continental United States. The fort has been operated by the National Park Service since 1933 as the Castillo de San Marcos National Monument. It was designed by the Spanish engineer Ignacio Daza, with construction beginning in 1672, 107 years after the city’s founding while the city was still under Spanish control.

Castillo de San Marcos was attacked several times and twice besieged. Possession of the fort has changed five times, all peaceful, among four different governments: Spain, 1695–1763 and 1783–1821, Kingdom of Great Britain, 1763–1783, and the United States, 1821–date (during 1861–1865, under control of the Confederate States of America). Owing to its strategic cannon placement and star-shaped design, the fort was never breached or taken by force throughout its various stages of sovereign ownership.

The Castillo is a masonry star fort made of a stone called coquina (Spanish for “small shells”), which consists of ancient shells that have bonded together to form a sedimentary rock similar to limestone. Native Americans from Spain’s nearby missions did most of the labor, with additional skilled workers brought in from Havana, Cuba. Construction began on October 2, 1672, and lasted twenty-three years, with completion in 1695.

After visiting the Castillo, we walked along St. George Street which is one of the most recognizable and visited areas in St. Augustine. It’s a pedestrian-only route through Historic Downtown, lined with colonial-era buildings, courtyards, and a mix of museums, restaurants, shops, and historic landmarks. St. George Street follows a colonial roadbed first laid out in the 1700s. Many of its buildings are original structures or faithful reconstructions on historic foundations. Part way along St. George Street we stopped for a good lunch at the Burrito Works Taco Shop, and then a little further down the road we had dessert at the Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Store.

After getting back on the Trolley shuttle we toured around some more areas of the city and saw some of the original historic St. Augustine homes before hopping off to walk around the outside of the original Hotel Ponce de Leon, and now Flagler College. Originally a luxury hotel built by millionaire developer and Standard Oil co-founder Henry M. Flagler, built between 1885–1887, the winter resort opened in January 1888. The hotel was designed in the Spanish Colonial Revival style and is the first of its kind constructed entirely of poured concrete, using the local coquina stone as aggregate. The hotel was one of the first buildings in the country wired for electricity from the onset, with the power being supplied by DC generators installed by Flagler’s friend, Thomas Edison. Since 1968, with the founding of Flagler College, the original building and grounds of the hotel serve as the centerpiece of the campus of Flagler College.

We also walked around the Hotel Alcazar across the street from Flagler College that was also constructed by Flagler using the same poured concrete method. Both hotels appealed to wealthy tourists who traveled south for the winter on his railroad, the Florida East Coast Railway. The Alcazar had a steam room, massage parlor, sulfur baths, gymnasium, a three-story ballroom, and the world’s largest indoor swimming pool; however, after years as an elegant winter resort for wealthy patrons, the hotel closed in 1932. In 1947 Chicago publisher Otto C. Lightner purchased the building to convert the old hotel into a hobbies museum. He used the space to house several collections, including his own extensive collection of Victorian era art. He then turned it over to the city of St. Augustine and the museum opened to the public in 1948 and operates to this day as the Lightner Museum.

Rather than take the trolley shuttle back to our parking spot we walked back along the Matanzas River which is part of the Intracoastal Waterway. We passed the pair of copies of the marble Medici lions that guard the entrance to the Bridge of Lions, a double-leaf bascule bridge that spans the Intracoastal Waterway and connects downtown St. Augustine to Anastasia Island across Matanzas Bay.

There was a lot to see in St. Augustine, and our one day visit took us around the highlights. The most interesting part of the visit for us was the Castillo de San Marcos. One could certainly spend several days exploring the city and looking at the historic buildings and neighborhoods in more depth. Photos from our visit are included below. Click on the thumbnails for full size images.

Savannah, Georgia

2026-02-01 by Martin

We visited the historic city of Savannah in mid-December 2025 while staying at the Thousand Trails Oaks at Point South RV Park in Yemassee, South Carolina just under an hour away

We decided to book a day pass on Old Town Trolley Tours to tour around the city. We parked at the visitor center in downtown Savannah which had a very reasonable hourly rate and boarded the shuttle at the nearby stop. The hop-on-hop-off trolley tour has 16-stops throughout the old town area. During our visit we rode on several different trolleys as we “hopped on and off” to walk around various areas of the city. The drivers of the trolleys all provided informative commentary about the history of the city, its buildings, and people as we travelled around.

Established in 1733 on the Savannah River, Savannah is the oldest city in Georgia, and was the capital of the colonial Province of Georgia and later the first state capital of Georgia. Savannah’s downtown area includes the Savannah Historic District, its 22 parklike squares which are laden with monuments, live oaks for that iconic Southern-Gothic feel, and the Savannah Victorian Historic District. It is one of the largest National Historic Landmark Districts in the U.S., designated by the federal government in 1966, and largely retains the founder James Oglethorpe’s original town plan, a design known as the Oglethorpe Plan.

Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) with an enrollment of 18,000 students now plays a large roll in restoring and supporting the city. SCAD’s efforts to work with the city of Savannah to preserve its architectural heritage include restoring buildings for use as college facilities, for which it has been recognized by the American Institute of Architects, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Historic Savannah Foundation and the Victorian Society of America. The college campus includes 67 buildings throughout downtown Savannah, many of which are on the 22 squares of the old town.

We enjoyed walking around various areas of the city in between our rides on the Trolley. We stopped for lunch at the 30-acre Forsyth Park that was established in 1841 and is the oldest public park in the city. We strolled around the park with its lush lawns and tree-lined promenades with a large memorial and some statues in the center. We bought sandwiches at a store that bordered the park and enjoyed a nice picnic lunch at one of the park benches.

We can recommend the Trolley tour as a great way to see and learn about the city. We particularly enjoyed the architecture and the many historic squares throughout the city with their iconic canopy of live oaks decorated with Spanish moss.

Pictures from our visit are provided below. Click on the thumbnails for the full size images.

Washington DC by Bike

2026-01-162025-12-30 by Martin

We visited Washington DC in early November 2025 while staying at the Pohick Bay Regional Park in Lorton, Virginia. We rode our bikes along the Mount Vernon Trail from Alexandria, about 10-miles into DC and parked at the Jefferson Memorial before continuing our tour on foot around the Tidal Basin, National Mall, and a number of other memorials and monuments, famous and less-famous.

The Mount Vernon Trail is an 18-mile paved multi-use trail that stretches from George Washington’s Mount Vernon to Washington DC. The trail links Fairfax County and the City of Alexandria, to Arlington County and major Potomac River bridge crossings into the District of Columbia. The National Park Service originally constructed the Mount Vernon Trail in the 1970s and 1980s. The Mount Vernon Trail winds alongside the Potomac River with great views of the Washington DC skyline. We really enjoyed riding our bikes along this trail and were grateful we didn’t need to find parking for our F450 dually truck in DC. Allen had last been to DC on a 7th Grade School trip, and Martin had visited briefly in the early 1990’s, so it was a long time since either of us had visited, and a number of the monuments didn’t even exist during our original trips.

After parking our bikes and visiting the Jefferson Memorial we headed north on foot around the east side of the Washington Channel Tidal Basin, past the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and the National Holocaust Museum, and on to the Washington Monument that sits in the center of the National Mall. To the east we had clear views of the United States Capitol Building, and to the west we could see the Lincoln Memorial beyond its iconic reflecting pool. We continued on foot west towards the Lincoln Memorial. On the way we visited the World War II Memorial that was dedicated in 2004. The memorial surrounds a large stone plaza and fountain with a ring of columns representing the U.S. states and territories, joined together by a bronze cord symbolizing their united effort.

Continuing on towards the Lincoln Memorial, we sat on a park bench near the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool to eat our picnic lunch. We were passed by a number of guided tours using a variety of transportation including segues and e-bikes. Continuing on we walked through the very poignant Vietnam Veterans Memorial with its famous black granite walls listing the names of over 58,000 servicemembers who gave their lives between 1956 and 1975 in chronological order starting and ending at the center of the wall.

Our visit to the Lincoln Memorial was all the more interesting as we had recently been to Gettysburg and visited the site of Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg address, putting his life and achievements into some context. From the Lincoln Memorial at the west end of the National Mall we continued towards the tidal basin, passing through the Korean War Veterans Memorial which features a formation of 19 stainless steel statues representing a U.S. Army patrol moving through rugged terrain. The soldiers—drawn from different branches of the armed forces—are depicted in ponchos and combat gear, evoking the harsh conditions of the Korean Peninsula.

One of the most recent (2011) and spectacular memorials is the Martin Luther King Memorial at the north side of the Tidal Basin. This memorial depicts a 30-foot carving of King on a feature called the “Stone of Hope” that is being moved out of a feature called the “Mountain of Despair,” a reference to a line in the “I Have a Dream” speech. King is represented standing firm, resolute, and thoughtful, holding a rolled stack of papers. Quotations from speeches and writings are engraved on the arced “Inscription Wall” on the flanks of the memorial.

Continuing south around the west side of the Tidal Basin we walked under some of the famous cherry trees that were originally a gift from Mayor Yukio Ozaki of Tokyo in 1910. Unfortunately, these trees became diseased, but they were replaced in 1912 with over 3,000 new plants. A few dozen of the original Tidal Basin trees still bloom each year and have been supplemented with thousands more throughout the district.

On our way round the west side of the tidal basin we entered the Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorial that opened in 1997. The FDR Memorial is not a monolithic, white marble structure, but a flowing landscape of architectural design. The memorial is designed as a timeline starting at the northernmost end. Bronze sculptures by several artists depict the longest-serving president and the major issues he dealt with during his presidency including the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II. The memorial consists of a series of “rooms” celebrating the 4 terms of FDR’s presidency.

Continuing on around the Tidal Basin we completed our loop back to the Jefferson Memorial and returned to our bike parking spot. It was a great half-day touring around Washington DC. We got to see a lot in a couple of miles walk around the Tidal Basin and National Mall.

Coronado Village Mobile Home & RV Resort – Albuquerque, NM

2024-11-132024-10-15 by Allen

Coronado Village Mobile Home & RV Resort is one of our favorite RV parks. Nestled in north Albuquerque, NM, near I-25 and Paseo Del Norte Blvd NE, it’s a surprisingly tranquil spot despite its proximity to the freeway, thanks to its vastness with 350 spaces. We visited twice in May 2023 during spring and again in October 2023 for the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta.

We travel to Albuquerque often due to Martin’s Vedic chanting workshops and prefer to stay at Coronado Village. No amenities are within walking distance unless you’re up for a mile or two trek.

The standout feature of this park is its 7-acre grassy area at the southern end. Google calls it Scallop Park, though it’s entirely within Coronado Village. The greenbelt boasts large cottonwood, fir, cedar, and mulberry trees.

Springtime in the park is delightful. There is a blanket of yellow dandelions and their seedheads, and the mulberry and cottonwood trees are budding with new growth as the temperature starts heating up. October weather can be cool, but it’s not too cold yet.

During our first visit in May 2023, I expressed interest to the office staff that we would like to attend the balloon fiesta in October 2024. Coincidentally, there was a cancellation on our departure day for the October 2023 Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta. We snagged the reservation immediately, even though the rates spiked during the event. Coronado Village is very close to the fiesta grounds.

October’s visit was spectacular, with balloons landing in the RV park, even right in front of our RV. The weather cooled quickly, requiring a heavy sweater by the end of the month. Early October was mild enough for just a light jacket, even for nighttime fiesta events, to which we rode our e-bikes.

A useful tip we’ve learned for saving money while traveling is to stay for a month when possible, as it often costs about the same as a two-week stay. This usually requires paying for electricity, but staying longer allows us to slow down and truly enjoy the area.