Florida on Summer Vacation?

Why we would choose to head to the hot and humid south for our summer vacation

In Mission: Wanderlust, I write and podcast about our family’s travel adventures and the things that we have learned along the way.

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Florida is not a new vacation destination for us.

Like many Midwesterners, we have headed down to Florida for Spring Break to escape the last blast of winter before the true arrival of spring. As a couple we traveled to Fort Lauderdale and Key West for two separate adventures with Jeff’s family before we took our own kids a few years before we moved to Texas. I can’t say that we love Florida, because there are certainly other places I would put higher up on my to-visit list, but there are places in the state that we enjoy and have experienced multiple times because we enjoy them more than the state itself.

But still, Florida in summer is quite different than at the end of March or the beginning of April. The first time Jeff ever suggested that we visit Florida in the summer, we were still in the early years of living in Texas and our kids were right at the age where we wanted to visit Disney. With plans to go to Fort Wilderness, we needed more than the typical one week for Spring Break to guarantee enough time for travel and the parks.

The reasoning was that if we were already going to be hot and miserable, we might as well be hot and miserable in the most magical place on earth.

So we packed up both kids and took off for Orlando during the middle of July, right into the heat of summer. And we loved every minute of it. So much so that we made the mistake of promising the kids that we could return in six years, right before our oldest was a freshman in high school.¹

(Note to parents of littles: Six years goes really fast. Be careful what you promise while in a Disney-infused euphoria.)

Over the next six years we experienced a different kind of magic in Mesa Verde, Arches, and Rocky Mountain National Park. We survived some lows with a summer vacation out east right before our big move back to Indiana. And we enjoyed the medium excitement of our immersion into history in Gettysburg and Philadelphia.

But the kids never forgot the promise that we made. It didn’t matter that between that time we had experienced a global pandemic, job losses and changes, inflation and price hikes, and a massive move back across the country; we had promised that we could return once the changes we were excited for were complete.

And we would be returning to parks with new rides and experiences with a teenager and preteen ready for new experiences.

We held a family meeting and were honest: this was going to be a massive undertaking. Disney has outpriced even local Florida residents and we were not immune to the pain in our wallets. Summer are just getting hotter and we would be traveling during the hottest summer on record.² We all wanted to experience Universal for the first time as a family (Jeff had been years before) and that meant extra expense and we would have to give up a day in Disney.

And then there was the moral question of how much money did I really want to spend in Florida, especially in light of the recent legislation that keeps pouring out of the state, infecting other states like our own Indiana.

But we also live and work in a red state. I am a militant moderate raising my purple family in the middle of a sea of red politics.³ We have friends and family in Florida who are constantly weighing the safety of staying the state. I understand what it is like to live and love a place that doesn’t always love you back.⁴ I know that it isn’t easy to just pick up and move, and sometimes it just isn’t possible. And I know that sometimes we need to stay in a place we love even if it is difficult, because it is home. It is far too easy to say that people in Florida have chosen what is happening in their state, because politics is far more complicated than that. And so we were going to support the people who live there, not the politicians making life in Florida increasingly difficult for them.⁵

Every other week for the next three months I will tell you the story of our travels down to the Sunshine State. I will tell you about our favorite parts of Disney, our first foray into the world of Universal, and our feelings about the companies behind the magic. If you want a preview of these stories, you can check out my Instagram and look at my photos and reels. Also, don’t forget to follow me on Threads.

In the meantime, thank you for continuing to join me on the journey and share with others. I hope that you enjoy the ride.

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1. In our defense, Hollywood Studios was right in the middle of constructing their Star Wars portion of the theme park, in what would eventually become Galaxy’s End. We all wanted to return to see it.

2. But if we wanted to do everything on our list, summer was still the best time to go.

3. A friend recently called me a militant moderate and I’m embracing it.

4. Our years in Texas being exhibit A.

5. And more about this in next week’s post.