How to do a Florida Road Trip – 10 Things You Need to Know

My third, or maybe fourth, day on the road and I finally reached the Florida border. Coming from Savannah, Georgia, I made my way down I-95 into Florida with little fanfare: my Google Maps app announcing “Welcome to Florida.” It was already dark, but I was relieved. The final stretch of my I-95 road trip from NYC to Miami (give or take a few hundred miles).

When I first announced I was going on this road trip—as a favor to my aunt who needed her car down south—just about everyone I knew warned me about Florida. “Florida is big,” they’d say. I know, that, of course, but I’d kind of forgotten. I’ve done one other Florida road rip about a decade ago. I drove from tip-to-tip, from Key West all the way up iI-95 and then across the panhandle en route to New Orleans and, eventually, Dallas.

I have a few distinct memories from that road trip—passing what seemed at the time, the Everglades, indistinct cities from the highway and a long (very long)…