Winter RV Trip to Florida with Kids

We’re taking our motorhome to Florida for winter break! With four kids, our dog Ziggy and 18 days off the usual routine, we’re heading south for freshwater springs, Christmas at the beach and our first family visit to the Everglades. We’ll probably make it as far as Key Largo before turning north for one more night on the Florida coast.

The manatees are a big part of why I’m excited about going in December. When the coastal water cools, wild manatees gather in the warmer springs around Crystal River, and we’re hoping to see them with our faces in the water, but from a more dry & convenient distance is also good enough - we'll see how the kids cooperate. A few days later, we could be looking down through the floor of a boat at a coral reef in the Keys. Add a picnic on the Atlantic and an afternoon looking for alligators and much more of the wildlife in the diverse ecosystem of the Everglades, and I’m quite happy with how we’re spending this school break. If you are looking to plan an RV trip to Florida with kids, follow along for live updates to see what we loved, and what we would do differently.

Our RV trip to Florida with our kids at a glance

Where we’ll be	What we have planned
Driving south	Leave after school/work and split the drive over the weekend, with overnight stops flexible around the weather.
Crystal River	Explore the archaeological park, snorkel in Kings Bay and take a glass-bottom boat at Silver Springs.
Juno Beach	Spend time by the ocean at MacArthur Beach and Juno Dunes.
South Miami-Dade	Visit Biscayne National Park, spend two days in the Everglades and take the car to Key Largo.
Melbourne Beach area	Spend our last Florida afternoon near the Indian River Lagoon.
South Georgia	Welcome the new year with a full day off the road.
Driving home	Split the return drive over three days and arrive home.

Getting to Florida Over Winter Break

Ohio weather gives us a good reason to keep the first few nights of our planned trip flexible. If the forecast on our first day of the trip cooperates, we’ll get a head start with driving a few hours south. Then, over the weekend, we’ve allowed about four to four and a half hours of driving each day, plus stops for lunch, fuel and stretching everyone's legs. On Monday we’ll finally arrive at Crystal River.

The part I’d borrow for a trip from anywhere is the shorter arrival day. It'll give us a chance to park the bus and walk along the river that afternoon. It also gives us room to lose a few hours to snow without moving the outing we came all this way for.

Crystal River and Silver Springs with Kids

We’d love to spend our first Florida afternoon at Crystal River Archaeological State Park. Along the river are shell mounds and a plaza built by Native communities who gathered here over centuries. The museum is usually open on Mondays and closed the following two days, so if we make it there in time, we’ll visit the exhibits before heading outside to see the site itself. A useful link for this plan - Park hours

Tuesday is for the manatees. We’re hoping to take a boat into Kings Bay with an in-water guide, pull on our masks and float quietly while the animals go about their morning. With kids ages 6 to 15, I appreciate that everyone can go out on the boat, including anyone who’d prefer to stay dry. Later we’ll take the shuttle to the Three Sisters Springs boardwalk. I like the idea of seeing a manatee at eye level in the morning and then looking down into the clear spring pools to see how many we can spot from above. Useful links for this plan - Guided snorkel · Three Sisters Springs boardwalk

On Wednesday we’ll drive inland to Silver Springs State Park near Ocala. We’re hoping for the glass-bottom boat ride, with time beforehand to walk around the headspring and unpack a picnic. Here the windows in the floor let you look straight down at the springs feeding the Silver River. There are fish, aquatic plants and even old movie props left underwater from films made here. A useful link for this plan - Silver Springs boat tours

Christmas at Juno Beach

We’ll be trading the springs for two nights on the Atlantic. After four or five hours in the motorhome, I think all six of us will be ready to kick off our shoes at Juno Beach. I’d also had my eye on nearby Blowing Rocks Preserve, where waves can shoot up through openings in the limestone. It might be closed on both of our dates, so that one may have to go on the list for another trip. A useful link for this plan - Blowing Rocks holiday hours

For Christmas Day we’ve picked John D. MacArthur Beach State Park. To get to the ocean, you cross a long boardwalk. We can take our time looking for birds feeding in the shallows on the way out, then spend the afternoon with a packed lunch and our kids who have an entire beach to relax and rewind on. Juno Dunes Natural Area is nearby if we feel like pulling our shoes back on for a walk through the coastal scrub. Useful links for this plan - MacArthur Beach State Park · Juno Dunes

Biscayne National Park from Homestead

Later on we’ll move the motorhome to southern Miami-Dade County. From there we can reach two national parks and the Upper Keys by car, and everyone gets to leave their things exactly where they dropped them for four nights.

At Biscayne National Park, I’m hoping we can take the afternoon Heritage of Biscayne Cruise from the Dante Fascell Visitor Center. The boat crosses Biscayne Bay, and about an hour of the three-and-a-half-hour outing is ours to spend ashore. I’d love to see the lighthouse on Boca Chita Key. Depending on conditions, we may explore Elliott Key or Adams Key instead. A useful link for this plan - Heritage of Biscayne Cruise

Two days in Everglades National Park

We booked the Shark Valley tram where a naturalist will navigate us through our first visit to the Everglades, The tram also stops at an observation tower overlooking the sawgrass marsh. We’ll head out early for the holiday parking line and bring lunch. If we get through quickly, our younger ones can pick up their Junior Ranger books before we board. Useful links we've used: Shark Valley tram · Winter parking information

For our second day at the Everglades, I’d like to see where the freshwater marsh gives way to coastal mangroves. I originally penciled in a cruise from Flamingo. Then I looked at the photos and realized I’d been picturing a much smaller boat, where our youngest could hear the guide and see the same bird the older kids were pointing at.

One possibility leaves from Chokoloskee, on the park’s western side. A Florida Master Naturalist takes up to six people through the mangrove-lined bays of the Ten Thousand Islands, so our family would fill the boat. The guide can follow narrower channels where conditions allow, and take us for diverse wildlife viewings and to witness the amazing ecosystem of the park. That’s the part I’m most interested in. However, at about $700 for two hours and roughly two hours’ driving each way from the Homestead area, it’s also the biggest decision we still have to make. A useful link for this activity: Ten Thousand Islands wildlife boat tour

Key Largo as a day trip

I originally allowed a night in the Florida Keys. Once I wrote down what we wanted to do there, nearly all of it was in John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park. We can take the car to Key Largo, spend the day and be back at the bus for dinner.

If the sea conditions are good, we’ll aim for a glass-bottom boat. Yes, that would make two glass-bottom boat rides in one trip! At Silver Springs we’ll be following a freshwater river. Here we’d head offshore to see living coral and the reef fish moving through it. The ride takes about two and a half hours, leaving us time to explore the shoreline before we head back. A useful link for this activity: Pennekamp reef boat

One more afternoon on the Florida coast

Our last night in Florida is currently planned to be near Melbourne Beach, where the Indian River Lagoon lies just inland from the Atlantic. It’s about three hours north of our southern base, so we’ve left our last day there open by the water. By then we’ll have worked around enough boat departures to appreciate a beach afternoon that can start whenever we get there.

Once we wrap up our Florida adventures, we’ll head into South Georgia and stay two nights in a wild safari campground that I cannot wait to visit and explore with my kids! I’m looking forward to waking up during the holidays with a little festive breakfast to make and absolutely no reason to put the RV's slides in. We’ll divide the rest of the drive, adjusting the overnight stops for the weather as we head home.

Vegan Meals on Our Florida RV Trip

As always when we travel (as well as at home!), we cook most of our meals, and we do try to keep things balanced - that means we don't necessarily make complicated meals or completely avoid processed foods - we love treating ourselves with yummy dinners, but at the same time, we want to invest as little time as possible in the kitchen, to prioritize experiences with the limited time we have. Having said all of that, we do keep track of what we eat, and it primarily means we snack on lots of fruits and veggies. We make sure we are all well-nourished before an entire day out, and make sure to equip ourselves with healthy protein-packed sandwiches and plenty of water for the day, so there's no rush to go back to the bus as soon as lunch time hits. FourSprouts have a wonderful 6-categories pantry system for road trips that helps pack smart for the road, and we also have plenty of creative easy recipes to make sure we plan ahead. We'll keep this post updated (live!) when we hit the road, and share what we've been cooking :)

When we visit new places, we do love exploring local vegan foods, so we do already have a list in mind with a few places we’d like to try. Papa Kwan’s has vegan options in Juno Beach, Yardie Spice in Homestead is on my list for lentils or tofu, and Coco Plum Place could be our breakfast stop on the way to the reef boat in Key Largo. For Christmas Day, I’m quite happy with the lunch plan we already have. We get to eat it at the beach. Papa Kwan’s · Yardie Spice · Coco Plum Place

I’ll update this post as we travel and again once we’re home, with the places we stayed, what the tours cost for all six of us and which outings we’d do again. I’m especially looking forward to adding our own photos from Crystal River. I’ve spent enough time looking at pictures of other people’s manatees!