Burlington Vermont to Miami Florida Road Trip

For the entire month of December I explored the East Coast of the United States. My trip began in Burlington, Vermont and concluded in Miami Beach, Florida. I visited two UNESCO World Heritage Sites (one of my travel goals), and visited a bunch of unique cities. I experienced a ton of new things that I had never done before; from snorkeling with manatees, to wading waist deep through the world’s largest strand swamp, to driving the historic Blue Ridge Parkway, to exploring the largest tract of old growth hardwood forest left in the United States with the tallest trees in the Eastern U.S.

Below are the highlights of the places of my Vermont to Florida road trip.

Vermont to Florida Road Trip Itinerary:

1. Burlington, Vermont (our summer home)
2. New York:
   Saratoga
   Storm King Art Center
3. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania:
   Academy of Natural Sciences
   Eastern State Penitentiary
   Independence Hall (UNESCO World Heritage Site)
   The Mütter Museum
   Philadelphia Museum of Art
4. Maryland:
   Inner Harbor, Baltimore
   National Aquarium of Baltimore
5. Washington, D.C.
   National Gallery of Art
   Smithsonian Natural History Museum
   Jefferson Memorial
6. Virginia:
   Grand Caverns
   Monticello (UNESCO World Heritage Site)
   Roanoke
   Blue Ridge Parkway
7. North Carolina:
   Blue Ridge Parkway
   Asheville
   The Biltmore Estate
   Charlotte
8. South Carolina:
   Congaree National Park (In search of some of the tallest trees on planet Earth!)
   Charleston
   Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston
   Hilton Head
9. Georgia:
   Savannah
   Sea Island
   Cumberland Island National Seashore
10. Florida:
    Devil’s Millhopper Geological State Park, Gainesville
    Florida Museum of Natural History, Gainesville
    Goethe State Forest (to see the Goethe Giant + Buck Island Pond Trail)
    Snorkeling with Manatees, Homosassa Springs
    Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park, Homosassa Springs
    Honeymoon Island State Park, Dunedin
    St. Petersburg
    Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, Sarasota
    Myakka River State Park, Sarasota
    Crowley Museum and Nature Center, Sarasota
    Siesta Key Beach, Sarasota
    Six Mile Cypress Slough Preserve
    Big Cypress Bend Boardwalk, Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park
    Fakahatchee Strand Swamp Walk
    South Beach, Miami Beach (our winter home!)

Regarding the 40+ hours it took to plan this trip; originally I had attempted to use Roadtrippers.com to plan this Vermont to Florida road trip, (along with Tripadvisor, Airbnb, Hotels.com and Google), but after hours and hours of using Roadtrippers I got so sick of it not working intuitively, and having so many errors, that I gave up on it. Although the Roadtrippers website is useful because each location in their database has a description, some photos, and some reviews, the website and the iOS app are extremely buggy and both have extremely annoying errors such as “Sorry, we have no idea how to get to the National Aquarium of Baltimore”, so it becomes quite the excruciating task to plan a road trip with it, which is not only ironic, it defeats the whole purpose. Additionally, Roadtrippers is limited to 40 stops per trip including custom waypoints to take specific routes, so only about half of my chosen destinations were allowed to fit into their system.  After becoming very frustrated with their mapping system I decided that from now on, I will Google Maps for directions for the whole trip and will just use Roadtrippers as a way to discover places to visit.  It’s unfortunate that it’s such an annoying app to use; the concept is great but the execution is not so great; and the lack of places to visit is a huge limitation, especially for avid hikers looking for trails. In the end, I wound up using Google Maps Engine to build my own custom map to know where to drive, which is shown in the above photo. I HIGHLY recommend using the Google Maps Engine to plan complex trips like this; it was not only fun, but worked!