Travelogue: Melbourne, FL to St. Louis, MO

Time Frame: July 7 – August 1, 2010
Miles Driven: 1818

With my father well on the mend after his lung removal, we were ready to head on from hot and muggy Florida and continue our adventures. With only one destination to make this summer – Burning Man 2010 at the end of August – we started listening to where nomadic serendipity would send us.  Never ones for taking the most direct route from Florida to California, options seemed to align beautifully for us to experience some amazing things and spend time with amazing people.

State Parks up the East Coast

Our first destination got set for Columbia, South Carolina for a meeting with a new software development client we just signed. With a week until our first meeting and now integrating in running into our travels, we decided to find some state parks with trails to stay and run at.

First stop was Tomoka State Park in Ormond Beach, Florida – which is one of our all time favorite places to stay. Right on the Indian River and nestled in the Florida hammocks – it’s a very relaxing place to kick back at, while still remaining accessible to civilization (including awesome 3G cellular signal!).

And then we meandered northward and decided on Skidaway Island State Park near Savannah, Georgia. Almost as soon as we got the landing gear down, long time followers Elliott & Ann contacted us and offered to give us a tour of Savannah!  It was awesome to finally meet up.  We also enjoyed Skidaway Island, got some good running in and enjoyed a private nighttime guided tour of the salt marshes by the ranger.

And then it was onward to Columbia for our business meeting.  We found Sesquicentennial State Park right in the middle of everything and also offering wonderful wooded sites and running trails. In addition to our meeting, we had a nomadic rendezvous with Andy & Lori of Life In The Right Lane who were ending their several month long RV road trip and heading for an epic adventure to Ukraine! It was great to catch up with them.

Our business meeting went really well, we even put on business clothes (a rare thing for us) – and we’re excited to be starting this new long term, nomadic-friendly, contract up in the coming weeks.

Rendezvouses with Friends

Almost just as soon as we set the meeting in Columbia up, our former sailing nomad friend, Barb (who we had just seen in St. Louis a month prior), told us she’d be in Floyd, VA teaching a jewelry class.  Which was perfectly on our route up to Indiana and gave us the opportunity to traverse more of the Blue Ridge Parkway.

We enjoy a couple day rendezvous with her in Floyd, met some of her friends and enjoyed some awesome live music on Friday night!  Floyd seems like a cool little hip town where hippies and farmers converge.

Our next destination was Westville, Indiana – and we discovered that our nomadic buddies Ben & Karen were hanging out at a vintage bus rally in Ohio. Which was also perfectly on our way.  So we routed via Loudonville, OH to converge with them and catch up since we last saw them in St. Louis. We got to see the type of vintage Flxble Starliner bus that Ben is currently converting to be his new technomadic home enjoyed a round of mini golf before we made plans to meet up in a week in Chicago for a photowalk.

And then on to Indiana for a week with our friend Kele.  I’ve known her for a decade now, from my life in Florida – and we’ve kept up and grown closer since our physical lives diverged.  Her academic career is now taking her to Afghanistan for 3 years to be an administrator in a university there. We are overjoyed with excitement for her new expat life, and so happy we could arrange to be with her for a bit to help her put her tech life together and help purge a bit of her stuff.  She’ll be blogging her adventures at PomegranateVeils.com.

One evening as we were coming back from dinner along northern Indiana backroads, we saw Ben & Karen’s bus pass right in front of us!  A quick call revealed they had rather spontaneously decided to pull into Michigan City (not realizing this was just a couple miles down the road from where we were staying) instead of heading all the way into Chicago.  So we had a bonus nomadic rendezvous and got to introduce our friends to each other! What serendipity!

World Wide Photowalk – Chicago

On July 24, it was Scott Kelby’s Third Annual World Wide Photowalk – part of the whole Photoshop thing that Ben & Karen are known for in their professional and artistic careers. Since the event was open to photographers of all levels, we decided to join them for it.

With them now living just down the road from us, we decided to all take the train into Chicago together, and enjoyed an afternoon of shooting stuff.

Here are some of our favorite shots from the day that Chris & I took:

We departed with Ben & Karen after brew and dinner, probably not to rendezvous with them again until this coming winter. This year we’ll be able to count Texas (twice), Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and hopefully Florida as rendezvous spots with them.

St. Louis – Redux

Since our time in St. Louis in June got cut short due to my father’s illness, we wanted to route through St. Louis before heading westward to Burning Man to spend some time with Chris’ family.

Our time here has been filled with helping Chris’ aunt purge her record album, attending a free Concert in the Park, catching up with local friends and doing some cleaning and general maintenance on our Oliver Travel Trailer.

And now we start our westward trek to Burning Man.  We just signed up to attend an iPhone app developer’s conference in San Jose, CA on August 20 – so now we have a target arrival date , but no plans for our route there.

We’ll let serendipity figure that out for us, as it did a fine job for us this past month!