Have you ever had plans for a trip or adventure or vacation that got cancelled last minute? Maybe instead you can have a detour trip! In this article we share about how the last minute cancellation of a camping trip to Dry Tortugas National Park in the Florida Keys led to a fun and surprising detour Florida Road Trip Adventure!

Tent camping on a deserted island 100 miles West of the remote Florida Key famously known as Key West. What a wild & unique experience that must be we thought to ourselves. Now this was an adventure that would be hard to replicate and something we had to try to do. The plan was to tent camp on Dry Tortugas National Park after spending a couple of days in Miami Florida with my business partners.

The trip started normal enough. We spent two great days working with Mike & Paula then off we want from Miami to Key West. We had scored two tent camping spots for Dry Tortugas on a random cancellation several weeks ago. Typically these spots book out months in advance and when I called in October they were booked until spring of the next year.
The lady I spoke with decided to do a random search of spots even though she knew they were full for the next few months and someone had just cancelled! We snagged the spot on the phone right then.

We stopped in Key Largo to get all of our grocery provisions for 2.5 days on the deserted island & made our way to our hotel for the night in Key West.

It was about 730pm and we were to be at the dock at 6am to meet our friends from Camping Florida Keys to pick up all of our gear before boarding the Yankee Freedom III at 630am for the voyage to the National Park.

All the sudden my phone populated from being out of network range & I had a voicemail.

I listened to the call from Mimi at the Yankee Freedom letting us know that the captain had cancelled tomorrow’s boat trip due to massive storms that were predicted.

Our 2.5 day trip slated to start in 9 hours had been cancelled due to what Mimi said on the voicemail “Sometimes Mother Nature can be hell and it will be nasty out there.”

Now what?

That’s when our detour Florida Road Trip began! All of the sudden we were in Key West at the bottom of the continental US with no lodging for the next few nights and no idea what to do.

The first thing we did was get in contact with the amazing folks at Camping Florida Keys who graciously refunded our money in full. I can’t wait to go back to the keys to do beach camping with these folks. Kelly and the team there were so understanding and I highly recommend them!

We had two refunds, nowhere to stay, and no idea what we wanted to do for the next 3 days.

Detours allow for unplanned adventure which is such an underrated way to travel.

Opportunities all of the sudden seemed endless. I could literally feel my heart rate increase and my endorphins jumped around like I had just finished a CrossFit workout.
We had wracked our brains about whether or not to hold on to the camping gear but since torrential thunderstorms were predicted off & on for two days we opted out of sleeping in a tent.
We decided to spend the next night in Key West since we had already driven all the way down there and we had just arrived. We found a room the next morning.

Here’s what we go to do instead over the next several days during our Detour Florida Road Trip:

1. Visited the silly sign at the Southernmost point of the US. (Pic above.)
2. Take a tour of the Little White House aka the Truman House.
3. I took in a sold-out hot power vinyasa class on Christmas Eve at Key West Yoga to an all Christmas playlist.
4. Found the lovely Mellow Cafe & Gastropub, veggie friendly restaurants are hard to find by the ocean! Went there for dinner and then breakfast.
5. Explored the Key Deer National Wildlife Refuge and saw the endangered deers.
6. Drove to the end of “Lost Key.”
7. Found lodging (and hammocks) at Parmers Resort on Little Duck Key. A place we had never been nor heard of just 48 hours before. A place we would love to return to.
8. Did all the relaxing and reading we were hoping to do on Dry Tortugas but got in more pool time than expected.
9. Toured the Sea Turtle Hospital in Marathon Florida. The only hospital in the world dedicated to saving sea turtles and rehabbing & rescuing them to putting them back into the wild.
10. Did a kayaking tour with “Kayak Dave” through the mangroves of Sombrero Beach on Christmas Day.
11. Hiked and Explored Crane Point Hammock Nature Trails & Museum.

Was one experience better than the other?

I think it’s unfair to decide which experience (Dry Tortugas Tent Camping or our unexpected Detour Trip.) would have been more fulfilling…
What I do know is so often when we travel (or in our everyday lives) we lock ourselves in & put all of our chips into things that we may not have any control over.
The weather was atrocious and dangerous for us to tent camp on that island. That was something that was 100% out of our control.

What was in our control was to decide that this was an amazing opportunity for a “Detour Trip” of the Florida Keys. A place we likely would not have come back to and visited so soon (we had visited a year prior) had we not had the opportunity to tent camp on the Dry Tortugas.

In fact we had planned to go to Cuba after Miami until the tent camping opportunity arose. But there we were in the Florida Keys and we explored and connected in a way we likely would have never done should we have planned the trip in advance.

As a result of our Detour Trip I was reminded of the following:
1. Things don’t always happen as they are planned. Roll with it and embrace it.
2. The universe will give you what you need. Don’t try to overpower the energy of the universe.
3. Unplanned trips and travels are amazing!
4. There’s always something you can see or experience even in places you have been. (I have been to the Keys half a dozen times and this detour trip was all new to me.)
5. Don’t try to control what you can’t control. Back to that universe thing. Keep going back there.

All in all it was a great trip that I wouldn’t change any of it for. We laughed as we added experiences to our Detour Florida Road Trip we never thought we would get.

My late friend Tracy Austin always said the famous quote “10% of life is what happens to you, 90% is how you react to it.” Too often we try to control that first 10% and let our reactions happen based on things we can’t control.
Camping on Dry Tortugas National Park is supposedly one of the most epic adventures you can experience in the US National Parks. I hope to do it one day and I am grateful that I have done a day trip to the island.

But the Universe didn’t think it was our time to experience the tent camping…maybe some other time…or maybe never.
I’ll leave it up to the vibrations of the world to decide our future Dry Tortugas tent camping fate.

Until next time happy detouring y’all!

Because Adventure Feeds the Soul,
Mike R