Looking ahead at our schedule last week, Jason and I wondered the same thing: Why do we have three full days in Jacksonville, Fla.?

We still don’t know. Our best guess is that it’s a casualty of the many times Jason reshuffled our schedule to accommodate the Major League Baseball and college football games we want to attend this year. In any case, the question of why we had three days in Jacksonville was a moot point; the real question was, what do we do with them?

Aside from a round of golf for Jason, we couldn’t find much that interested us. (Sorry, Jacksonville.) But outside of Jacksonville?

Well. We couldn’t help noticing that, just two and a half hours away, was Kennedy Space Center.

Over the last two weeks, we entered a new phase of the trip: the southern city phase. We traded our hiking boots for comfortable walking shoes—or Docs in my case, because my formerly sprained ankle needs the support—and we hit the concrete.

I could tell you that we had lots of sightseeing planned. That we intended to explore each city with the same sense of adventure and excitement that we carry into national parks.

But honestly? We came for the food.

Look. Ever since Jason visited Austin a couple years ago and had his first taste of authentic Texas barbecue, he has not shut up about it. So you can imagine why, as he planned this phase of the trip, he oriented a lot of our schedule around eating.

And I can’t complain (anymore). Because now that I’ve tasted authentic Texas barbecue—not to mention New Orleans gumbo and South Carolina fried chicken—I can’t shut up about it either.

But anyway. I’ll try not to turn this newsletter into a southern-cooking menu.

Jason and I made a big mistake on our way out the door this morning. We just didn’t know it until 45 minutes later, when we got to our destination.

As soon as we pulled up to Kingsnake Trailhead in Congaree National Park, we hopped out of the truck and dashed to the boats lined up near Cedar Creek. We had a three-hour kayaking trip scheduled to start at 12:50 p.m., and we were running late. It’d taken longer than expected to fix something on the truck this morning,* so we’d had to grab our gear in a hurry and rush to the park as fast as we could.

At the trailhead, we found our kayaking guide right away. Strangely, he looked as frazzled as we felt.

Are we that late? I thought, but it was only 12:52 p.m. Our guide was still readying the boats, our fellow paddlers still zipping up their life jackets. If we’d caused a delay, it wasn’t a big one.

Then our guide told us, “I don’t know if you’ve seen the radar, but it’s coming.”

It meaning rain. A lot of rain. And, because we’d rushed out the door, Jason and I had forgotten our rain jackets and dry pants.**

While looking for things to do in New Orleans, we came across all kinds of tours. Walking history tours. Cocktail tours. True crime and cemetery tours.

One of them, however, tripped my bullshit detector: a ghost, voodoo, and vampire tour.
It wasn’t the ghosts and vampires that made my lips purse and my eyes narrow. It was the other part—voodoo.

Like many people, I knew very little about voodoo. What little I did know was based on movies and TV shows I’d watched as a kid. Think the Shadow Man in The Princess and the Frog and the cat ladies in Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island. (No, I haven’t and won’t watch American Horror Story, so I’ll stick with my animated examples, thank you very much.)

But I’d also heard voodoo is more than that. That real-life voodoo is nothing like the version Hollywood sells to us. That it’s a religion, a deeply misunderstood and misrepresented one.

​In our first couple weeks on the road, we’ve wandered across three—yes, three—deserts in the southwest U.S.: the Mojave, the Sonoran, and the Chihuahuan. We couldn’t see their borders as we crossed them, but I think we could feel them. Each desert has its own character, and while the Mojave is familiar to us—it’s our home, after all—the Sonoran and Chihuahuan feel like new friends.

Deserts can appear bleak at first glance, but they hold plenty of surprises. Keep reading to see some of the surprises we found recently.

We’ve endured all kinds of weather in our trailer. Triple-digit heatwaves. Bone-shaking thunderstorms. Frigid nights that froze our water gear.

But so far, nothing’s intimidated us more than wind.

I’m no stranger to wind. I grew up in Southern California’s High Desert, where 20-to-40-mph winds are about as constant as the rumble of dirt bikes. My skin still smarts from all the sand that blasted my face on family camping trips. I’m pretty sure some of it’s still embedded under my nails.

You’d think I’d be used to wind, but I gotta say: In a trailer, it’s a whole ‘nother ballgame.