Our original plan did not include camping in St. Augustine. However, we were switching our residency to Florida so that meant we needed to physically be in the state to take care of that.
We chose to make Anastasia Island State Park our home base for the week which is about 10 minutes from downtown St. Augustine. The campground is really nice – it had a lot of vegetation in the sites and they had a private beachy feel to them.
Our first day in town, we met up with some friends that we met last year in South Africa. They live in Jacksonville and were kind enough to drive out to St. Augustine and show us around. It was a super rainy day, but we still had an awesome time catching up with them and exploring downtown St. Augustine.
The beach is either a short drive or a long walk from the campsites, but that didn’t stop us from enjoying sunsets on the beach. It’s always a nice treat at the end of a work day to be able to go watch a cool sunset somewhere new each week.
That Tuesday, we drove to our new “home county” for our appointment with the DMV. We luckily had everything we needed and the appointment went as smoothly as it could have. That is, with the exception of the super salty employee we had helping us. She did not understand RV life’s appeal and she made it clear she did not want us as her new “neighbors”!
With our shiny new Florida ID’s in hand, we went to check our mail. We use a virtual mail service so we were really interested to see what it was actually like in person. We didn’t know what to expect, but what we saw wasn’t it! It is basically a big room with separate open boxes on lots of shelves with mail in them. Everyone there is super nice and it was neat to peek behind the scenes of the virtual mail operations.
After we got our mail, we went to meet up with one of Austin’s friends and his wife. They had us over for Taco Tuesday and it was a lot of fun catching up with them. As a result, we now have Taco Tuesday every week also!
The next day we were able to meet up with our new sailing friends we met on Cumberland Island. It’s so funny to us that we met friends camping on a remote island and were even able to meet up with them again!
The next evening we went to the popular Cap’s for sunset. Several people recommended this place to us so we wanted to check it out. We enjoyed the drive out there as much as we did the restaurant itself. We are glad we made it a point to visit!
Our last day in the campground was Friday, February 1. Which happens to be the day that the permits for Havasu Falls went on sale. Austin has hiked to the waterfalls before, but I have not. Austin talks about how awesome it is so I really want to see it for myself as well. Luckily, after two hours of trying – we were able to get a permit! I am so excited to visit Havasu Falls in November!
This was also a momentous day because it was my first time driving the RV! Right when we were getting ready to leave, one of Austin’s clients reached out and needed something by the end of the day. We needed to get on the road so we figured why not let me attempt to drive and he could work while we traveled. Austin got us to the interstate and I took over from there. Aside from a couple of swerves, I managed to keep it between the lines for 2 hours! It’s nice to know that it is an option for me to drive should that situation present itself again!
