The Blitz West, Part 1: Rainstorms and Flooded Roads

Anthony was finally back from his work conference in Palm Springs, which meant we could set out on our main travel plans for 2023: Heading west! With less than a month to get from South Carolina to Arizona, we were ready to pack in a lot of drive days, but still wanted to make sure we experienced places along the way. The first big stop for us would be just outside of New Orleans, but to get from South Carolina to Louisiana would require three travel days in a row. It was time for the blitz to begin!

Tickfaw State Park, about an hour outside of New Orleans, had been booked for weeks as our reprieve from multiple drive days in a row. This would be our opportunity to rest, catch up on work, pick up Amazon packages, and hopefully explore New Orleans one of the days. The drive from Hunting Island, SC to Tickfaw was 765 miles, and since we typically like to cap our drive days between 250-300 miles total, this ensured an even breakdown of our three drive days...or so we thought!

To split the last two-thirds of our trip, I had gotten in touch with my friend Jessica who was work camping at a resort on the Florida panhandle. The distance was perfect to allow our final drive day to be 250 miles, and so Jessica booked us for a night. This left only one unplanned overnight, which we'd need to find after our first drive day. The plan was to drive at least 250 miles on day 1, but ideally more than that, so we could have an easier drive on day 2. It's always nice on day 1 to cover as much ground as possible, since this is usually when we're most energized, but we immediately started down on the count.

We got a late start on day 1. Anthony was exhausted from his trip, and so we decided it was safer to have a slow morning instead of rushing out of our campground. We had booked a buffer day at Hunting Island in case Anthony's flight had gotten delayed, so we didn't need to worry about a checkout time. We took our time packing up and hitting the road, and when we thought we were ready to bounce, we noticed that our back-up camera wasn't turning on. It's a bit controversial in the towing world, with some RVers boasting that they've never used a back-up camera, but we've had trips without one before and definitely prefer to have ours for safety and maneuvering. We decided to try and fix the camera before heading on our way and were ultimately successful, but it delayed us about another hour.

By the time we got on the road, we were feeling good and could have driven further than we did, but as is the case with winter, we were running out of daylight. This is where we ran into our first obstacle. I had checked Harvest Host locations for west of Jacksonville, FL, and there weren't any available until about an hour outside the city. By then it would be totally dark, and most of the Harvest Host locations were farms. The idea of trying to navigate onto a farm at night wasn't appealing to us. I also looked up some HipCamp locations, and there were some viable options closer to Jacksonville, where we could arrive before dark. The problem here was, by the time I started looking at these locations, we were already approaching Jacksonville and had about 20-30 minutes to book. The way HipCamp works, there are some "instant booking" hosts, but even with those we'd want to ensure that we'd be able to get in on short notice. Lots of these places have gates. With no way of calling the host, I wasn't about to risk paying money for a site that we may not be able to get into. I learned then that HipCamp probably isn't a good choice for booking last-minute overnights.

Because we were feeling energized enough to keep driving, we hoped we could find an easily accessible parking lot to roll into after dark, but my research was turning up slim pickings. We didn't want to risk getting caught in the dark with nowhere to go like has happened in the past, so when in doubt, we just stop sooner than later. This left us at a Cracker Barrel on the west side of Jacksonville. We had a decent night there, but that left us with a lot of miles to cover in order to get to our Florida resort the next day.

We got up bright and early to make our push across the panhandle, aiming to get to our next stop early enough so that we could spend some time with Jessica and her husband David before shipping out again the next morning. Despite our own choices to delay us and cover less distance on day 1, the blitz was going smoothly. We drove about 340 miles to the Florida resort, got to catch up with Jessica and relax by the beach, and were happy to know exactly where we were ending up the next day. Once at Tickfaw, we'd have 6 days to regroup. We could see the light at the end of the tunnel!

This is where things started taking a turn. The forecast was not on our side, predicting rainstorms for most of the afternoon. We got out of Florida ahead of the storms, but ran into more as we made our way along the Gulf Coast. We hit a lot of big milestones, RVing through states we had yet to travel such as Alabama and Mississippi (but we didn't stop so we're not officially counting them yet), but it's unnerving to navigate new territory when storms are brewing, and those Gulf Coast storms are no joke! We hit some torrential downpours and spent the majority of our drive slowed down to 50mph with our hazards on. Unlike other times we've driven in bad weather, we noticed that the semitrucks couldn't care less about the poor visibility. They sped past us at 70mph like it was a bright sunny day. The only other drivers we saw taking precautions were two cars pulling small utility trailers. I knew all the speeding semis were a recipe for disaster, and sure enough, we soon came to a traffic jam. As we approached the flashing lights of emergency vehicles, we saw that a car had spun off the road and completely smashed its driver's side. Up the road was a semitruck that had pulled over and the driver was talking to two police officers. We aren't sure exactly what happened, but we assume a speeding semi had something to do with it.

Most of our driving was along interstates, so it wasn't until we got closer to Tickfaw that we noticed the consequences of downpours in Louisiana. Flood warnings popped up on my Google Maps, and just when we thought we were in the clear, we came to a flooded street only a couple of miles from the state park.

The plus side of driving giant Clyde in floods is that we have really high clearance. The downside to this is that we're towing our entire house. So we sat in the middle of the road for a couple of minutes, figuring out the best choice given our circumstances. We could mostly see the road through the water, so we were pretty sure the flood was only a few inches. We could navigate through that easily. But what about the part we couldn't see? It's a road we didn't know, so could we be super sure that there wasn't a dip in the road? The alternative wasn't great, either, as it would mean backing our trailer up about a half-mile until we reached a side street where we could turn around if that side road - a dirt road - wasn't too muddy, and if we had enough room to turn around because that side road was blocked by a gate (we were very aware of this side road because GPS wrongly wanted us to take it). Otherwise I'd be outside in the rain, helping Anthony back our rig up a mile. Suddenly Louisiana's warning "Turn around, don't drown" wasn't very appealing to us.

Amidst our surprisingly calm debate, a car approached from across the flood zone. "Oh good!" I said. "Let's see what they do!" So we waited and watched...and they stopped, waiting for us to make the first move. Can't blame them; they were in a sedan and we were in a monster truck. But we assume they were local, so we thought maybe they had more know-how. But no. We found ourselves at an impasse. So back to the debate. We were 99% sure we were going to ford the river when another sedan approached us from behind, and that person looked ready to rock and roll. We waved her around us and off she went, into the flood. Personally I don't think I would have been comfortable in a sedan, but she got through it unscathed, which meant we'd definitely be good. And so we followed ballsy sedan lady and made our way through the water.

Once on the other side, I watched sedan #1 in the backup camera (maybe this is what we need them for!) to see what they decided. Once they saw sedan #2 and us ford the river, they proceeded as well. As far as we know, no one turned around and no one drowned.

Quite a dramatic end to our 3 days of travel, and we hoped this wasn't setting the tone for our entire blitz west, but for now we were happy to be safe at our Tickfaw site and were ready to rest. But you know what they say...

There ain't no rest for the weary.