Y'all ready for a boondocking weekend? We're going to have some fun petting some
goats, hanging out with some chickens ... Checking out some lavender farms, actually,
the only one in the State of Florida. We are just outside of Tallahassee,
and we are boondocking, dry camping for a fun weekend.
We're Lauren and Daniel, RV newbies traveling the US living in an Airstream. After visiting
12 States in a loaner, we picked up our brand new 2021 Airstream Classic in Tampa, Florida, and we
are headed out West. We've learned over the last few months of RV life that we hate long drives.
To avoid them, we love staying at Harvest Hosts, AKA locally-owned farms, wineries, and breweries,
which is our plan for this weekend. As this is only our second boondocking adventure,
it's almost guaranteed we'll screw something up. Have advice? We love learning from y'all.
I made a new best friend. This is Honey, and she's very sweet.
The Harvest Host that we're staying at tonight is called Golden Acres Ranch,
and they have this adorable little store behind me where they sell completely locally-made goods.
From handmade scarves and socks, to fresh squeezed orange juice and homemade jellies
made from fruit on the farm, the store was full of local goodies. After purchasing a few items,
they asked us if we'd like to help feed a few of the baby goats. Of course, we said yes.
Hey, Mona. Hello, and I'll let you choose which bottle and I'll let you choose which baby.
Okay, deal. Either one is fine with me. I like them both.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Mona. Good job. Here you go, here you go.
Oh my goodness. You're thirsty. She was born from a mom that I didn't
even think was pregnant. Oh my goodness.
So, average birth weight for these guys is like four or five pounds, and she was a pound and a
half when she was born. Aw.
She lived in the bathtub for a while, and now she lives on the porch. She's nearly a month
old now, so she's in the clear. She thinks she's ... Should we let
her drink the whole thing? Just eight ounces is good.
Okay, we've got to check again. I'm afraid I'm over-feeding you. Say, "That's all!"
After feeding the baby goats, I obviously wanted to take one home with us.
That was until I found that it's darn near impossible to house-train one.
So, back to the Airstream we went without a baby goat, for more boondocking fun.
Now that the sun is going down, it's time to eat some dinner, and we've got a bunch of leftovers,
including leftover pizza. So, we're keeping simple tonight, and I'm actually cooking. But one of the
things that I think we did that smart this time, thanks to some of you guys who gave us great
comments, is we bought paper plates. They're all eco-friendly and stuff, and eco-friendly utensils.
So, we don't have to do as many dishes while we are boondocking this weekend. Another thing that
we've decided is that we're not going to bring out the generators. Actually, Daniel decided that.
Okay, here's a real scoop. We've never used the generators. They still have the original packaging
on them from when we bought them from the store. I'm still a little gun-shy on using those things,
because there's two generators and they have a parallel kit and all kinds of fancy stuff.
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Back over here, mister. Except that we just got a little important
notification. Come check this out. Our handy dandy system just gave us an alarm to let us know
that we have "load-shed low", which means our batteries are going to go in the relatively near
future. Looks like we're going to be hanging out this evening by ... Well, you can't really have
candles in an RV. So, by flashlights. I think at this point since we're losing
battery life, we need to kill the power as fast as possible because we don't need to lose everything.
But I don't really want to find out what's going to happen, so we're just going to kill the lights.
Plan B. Well, we're
going to play board games by flashlight. It's going to be awesome. Basically what this means
is that tomorrow we're going to find that oil and gas that Daniel was talking about, and figuring
out those generators for night two. Apparently you can boondock without
generators if you're willing to go to bed at like 6:00 PM, and that is not us.
I think we need a little bit bigger plates. There's no way that's going to fit. Well ...
I'm never playing with you ever again, seriously. It's the same crap every
time. You're legitimately the luckiest person I've ever known in my entire life. It's not
fair, it's not fair. I literally was like one roll away from beating you,
and you're like, "Oh wait, no, I'll just roll a two and win. Oh,
meh, meh, meh, two." Well, to go with Daniel's whine,
I figured it would be appropriate for us to eat this delicious pecan-
Pecan. ...
dessert that we got at the little country store. Because we had teeny tiny little bites of this
at the store and it was incredible, so I cannot imagine something this large not being so good.
Especially if it has pecans.
It's pecan, for God's sake. Mm,
this is delicious. Made by locals, for some local appreciators who love pecans.
Can y'all tell his life goal is to annoy the crap out of me?
After I kicked Daniel's butt in board games, it is time to go to bed,
but there are two things that it's important for you to know. First, technically the lights
still work. You can see that our lighting is not reliant on our flashlight. But
the biggest problem is that we have to do this for two to three nights, so we kind of have
to be careful about our batteries. The second important thing is that if you watched our last
video on our very first boondocking experience, we may or may not have figured out how to work
our propane heating system, and tonight we have. I'm not freezing to death, so I'm feeling very,
very thankful for the heating system, because it's pretty awesome. See you in the morning.
Thank you, boo. Boondocking breakfast in bed.
Good morning, and welcome to day two of boondocking. Like I mentioned last night,
the heater in here works amazing. We are only down to 36.3% of our very first propane tank.
What we need to do next is doing some dishes with a little bit of a new twist. Last time
when we went boondocking, Daniel did the dishes, and we did them kind of traditionally. But what we
learned from you guys is that it's better to start with a really big pot, put a bunch of water in it,
and clean the dishes that way. So, that's what we're going to try this morning.
No water wasted. Oh, I didn't turn on the water pump. First thing's first.
Now this should work. Significantly better water pressure.
I'm not really sure how I'm supposed to be rinsing these, but I'm assuming that if I rinse them
over my pot of water, at least I'm saving the rinse water to clean the clean dishes? Or the
dirty dishes? I guess I could let them sit and dry, but we've got things to do today. Now that
all this is done, I guess that means it's time for us to go ahead and get ready for the day,
and go figure out what the heck to do with those generators. But I will say I'm pretty
proud. Come check this out. I have not even used a full percentage of our stored water
yet. Definitely a massive improvement from our first boondocking dish-washing experience.
We're all packed up. Time to go say goodbye to the baby goats.
Hi, guys.
You're so cute. Aw, yeah. That's the spot. Look, look, look, just like a doggy. Goat ears.
Hey, what are you doing? Trying to eat my shirt?
So cute. True story, when I was younger, we used to have ducks in our backyard that we raised
from little, little, tiny little things. I had a duck name DJ, and we raised him in a soup bowl,
and he would swim around the little soup bowl and it was the cutest thing ever. Eventually,
a few of his friends flew overhead, and little DJ said goodbye to us. The crazy thing to this
story is that we did not live on a farm, we lived in Orlando, Florida. While there may be farms,
not the neighborhood we were raised in. It was very much city life.
Before we hit the road, we figured enjoying some of this amazing orange juice made perfect sense.
So, cheers to travel! Mm. Let's do this. This was always my worst nightmare,
going down a dirt road and seeing a sign that says, "No outlet," and that's exactly
what we're seeing right now. Turn left onto ... In 800 feet,
your destination will be on the right. We just arrived at our second boondocking spot,
and when we got here, the gentleman told us they had 50-amp hookups. So, we're trying to
contemplate as to if we should be brave and take the time to figure out the generators,
or if we just should back into one of these cute little spots, hook up, and call it a day.
The back-up spots with the 50-amps have fire pits.
You know which one I'm opting for right now, just because we can always go off-grid another day.
I don't know what to do. One of us does.
I think we're going to be wussies and go hook up to the 50-amp.
How can you not? We would have never known that a Harvest Host offered 50-amp hookups.
That's just too tempting. And that is also too cool.
Okay, well, at least we still have to deal with rationing our water, which was going to be our
goal for learning today. So, we're still rationing water, we're totally cheating on electric.
We're so bougie, seriously. We're all about the hookup. It comes with a fire pit,
and there's actually wood already in it with a Firestarter log. It's perfect.
As soon as we parked, the lovely host started the fire for us. There's enough firewood here to keep
this fire burning for like five days, I don't know. It's a lot of wood, which is really cool.
The lavenders smell amazing. They have a small store onsite that sells lavender items,
so we of course picked up some of those little gems, and now we're just sitting by a campfire
making lunch. Life is good. We gave up on our paper plates
because our hot dogs are too big to not make a mess, but they're so good. Yum.
This is the real reason we decided to do boondocking plus electric, which is not a thing.
Daniel is really excited about the Bucks game. Exciting. We might be camping,
but there isn't anything I wouldn't do to have watched this game. I would have
dragged Lauren to a local sports bar, whatever it takes to watch this game tonight. Aw!
I will pick anti-boondocking over going to a sports bar every single day of the week.
Today was a good day. Thought we were going to be boondocking, wound up with a 50-amp hookup
and access to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers game, and they won.
I would give today a 9.5 out of 10 for awesomeness.
After a restful night's sleep on the farm,
we figured we'd show you around before we head off to our next destination.
Welcome to Florida's ... ... very first lavender farm.
It is absolutely beautiful, and it's purple everywhere, and that's my favorite color.
So, the property has tons of chickens, and hens, and
they even have a pig named Priscilla who is insane-level cute. Their puppy's name is
Cotton. He was named that because when he was little, he looked like a little cotton ball.
Have we mentioned we like dogs yet? Good morning! Hello, baby. You can
see Priscilla the pig is over there.
The owners here are so gracious and so hospitable. As soon as we got here,
Jason came over, he introduced himself, he got the fire started by our Airstream. He let us know
that we were free to take any of the eggs, fruit. They're just so lovely here, and
just the epitome of their name, Southern Grace, and those chickens are so loud.
But really, this place is amazing. Come on, let me show you around.
There's tons to do here, and seriously, I can see how it would be the perfect wedding venue. They've
got corn hole, chess. I asked on our Instagram page, 'Who do y'all think would win at playing
chess, me or Daniel?" So if you have an opinion, make sure to jump on Instagram, find us there,
or leave a comment below and let us know if you think Daniel would win, or I would.
Obviously ... Shh.
This is where the magic happens. This is over a thousand lavender plants. We're here in
January, so they're not in season right now, but they're still so pretty. When they are in season,
they get to be like this tall, and they've got big, beautiful,
purple blooms on the top, which is what you would expect to see with lavender.
Before we knew it, it was time to head back to the Airstream and pack up, but we had one last
surprise at the Southern Grace Lavender Farm. Look who's coming to say hi.
Hi. Hello, beautiful. Do you mind if I pet you? Oh, you're so handsome.
Rendezvous at the port-a-let.
There's no shortage of friendly animals around here.
Mm-mm (negative). I love it.
After saying goodbye to the horses, it was time to hit the road. Overall, it had been a successful
boondocking weekend, and we'd managed to only use about 20% of our fresh water tank. So, that feels
like a win. Now, we're off to Biloxi, Mississippi for our first casino camping adventure.
If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to our channel, and hit the bell so you'll be
notified when that crazy, cash-draining video launches next week. But until then,
make sure to wander local this week, friends. It's good for the soul.