Camper Van in Florida?

In order to minimize the risk from the Pandemic in 2020, we opt in camper van as to create the least contact as traveling in Florida. In the meantime, we would like to challenge ourselves to cook more and live with minimized lifestyle. We all agree, ultimately, experience instead of materialization is the core of traveling that creates life time memory.

In this post, we will share our experience and provide some statistics to give you some idea to figure out whether this is a good option for your next adventure. Please note that this analysis works in particular with Escape camper van in Florida.

Camper van is a van which comes with a refrigerator, sink, and an area where you can configure the bed and dining table. In the first glance for the amateurs, it is a good alternative vs. rent a sedan and sleep in campground. The following advantages are obvious…

• The sleeping area goes wherever you drive. It’s no longer to unpack and/or pack the tent. It does save some time to cramp everything in a busy itinerary.
• Have a roof on top of your head: No need to worry about rainy night. We were dry on last night when it rained in Florida.
• Campground reservation is recommended but not necessary for last-minute plan. However, this last minute plan finds challenge since we found many public parking lots are inside gated properties.
• With refrigerator and sink, the diet can be diversified. We got vegetable and protein from the grocery on the 1st day besides instant noodles.

However, it does have the following shortcomings to consider.

• Apparently, it does not come with shower and toilet. In the case where campground was full, we have to find a secluded place to stay. The night before visiting Myakka River State Park, we were not able to find a legit place and ended up unrested night. Another night we stayed in front of school and got yelled by a man at 6am.
• The restricted van pick-up and drop-off hours makes the flight schedule to comply with it instead of other way around. We delayed one day since the pick-up is not available on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. If you flew from West coast like us, it’s most likely to spend extra money for ride-shared to airbnb from airport and from airbnb to pick up the van next morning (~ $120).
• Also, even thought they advertise attractive daily rental rate with holiday promotion, if your itinerary is as aggressive as ours, then it’s better to calculate the mileage. Otherwise, you might end up with paying extra mileage fee ($0.33/per extra mile beyond 100 miles per day). We paid $131 extra mileage fees for our aggressive plan from Orlando to Key West, then Everglade, to Gainesville, then Ocala forest and back to Orlando.
• Last but not the least, do not forget the van has lower mileage in general (~17 MPG). We would have spent $65 less if we rented a regular sedan.

In conclusion, we thought Escape camper van will be a good option for those who traveled to only a few place in the trip, for example, staying in one national park for multiple days. Or if one park is in the vicinity of others, such as Utah. So that mileage won’t be an extra burden on the budget.

The extra costs we spent on ride-shared and gas would have been paid off for those who cooks every meals and prefer sleeping in the car instead on the sleeping pad.