Day 38 - Orlando to St. Augustine, Florida

Your humble correspondent has always been far more interested in the road less traveled than the road that contains the tracks of multitudes of my fellow humans. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy my fellow humans quite a bit. It's just that I like to enjoy them in less than crowd-sized numbers.

So it was that today, as we chose our route north from the western outskirts of Orlando, Florida, I had the choice of jumping on U.S. Route 4 which lay just a stone's throw from our campsite, or to choose a more bucolic route that might include a few stoplights, occasional holdups, and perhaps the opportunity of getting lost. You know what I chose.

We did have to travel a few miles east on Route 4 to get to our turnoff, and we did have to pay a few dollars in tolls for the route north that I chose, but very soon we were motoring north on some of the prettiest stretches of highway we have yet seen.

I know that some of you are going to want to know just what course we took. Here's what I remember: We went east on U.S. Route 4 from the vicinity of our KOA at the crossroads of Route 4 and Florida Route 27. Then we took the Florida Route 429 toll road north for a time. We should have exited the toll road around the town of South Apopka, but we missed the turnoff and ended up having to double back using the Orange Blossom Trail, Route 441, from the town of Piedmont. We continued on Route 441 until we came to a sign that said, "Florida Route 19 North." Once on Route 19 we were home free for most of the day. Route 19 eventually intersected Route 20 which eventually intersected Route 207 which quite quickly brought us to within a couple of miles of our camp.

And there you have it. We took the road less traveled, put up with just a tad of traffic in a couple of towns, and probably spent twice as long getting here as we would have if we had stayed on the Interstates. U.S. Route 4 charges right through the middle of Orlando, picks up U.S. Route 95 on the coast, and in just a couple of hours or so we would have been here at our destination in St. Augustine.

But here's the thing. If we would have taken the Interstates, we would have missed out on the beauty of rural Florida as seen in the above photograph and that surely would have been a big mistake. We're probably the only travelers who regularly take all day to drive a little over a hundred miles, but as they always say, "it's not the destination that's important, it's the journey."

And, as an added bonus, today we rolled past the 5,000 mile mark. We're 38 days into what should turn out to be a 10-week journey.

Cheers!