At 6:30 this morning, before Dana left for her shift and I left for school, we cancelled our Labor Day trip to the Keys. There was a tropical system in the outlook, the forecast for that weekend had gotten worse two mornings in a row, and neither of us wanted to be in a tent at the end of a single road while we waited to see what it did. I'll write up exactly what we got back once the refund posts. This post is about the bigger thing that decision sits inside.
We live in Miami. From June 1 to November 30 there's always a chance something is out there, and the busiest stretch, mid-August to mid-October, lands right on top of the school year's first long weekends. We've tried both ways of handling that: ignoring it, and letting it cancel everything. Neither works. Here's what we actually do.
What hurricane season means for our camping
For us, summer Florida tent camping is mostly off anyway. Dana's 70 rule (no tent camping when the forecast dew point is over 70) rules out nearly every Florida weekend from June through September. So our hurricane-season camping looks like this:
- One big summer trip out of state in June, before the peak. This year that was the Smokies and Savannah.
- A springs weekend in July, where the water is 73 degrees and the nights are bad but survivable. This year, O'Leno.
- Maybe one holiday weekend in late summer or early fall that we treat as "probably," not "definitely."
Home comes first. Our house is a 1978 concrete-block place in Kendall with accordion shutters across the front and aluminum panels for the back, and we're not in an evacuation zone. If there's any chance I'll be putting up those back panels that week, we're not camping. The gear bins, chairs and fire pit stuff come in from the carport, and that's our weekend.
We both grew up with storm stories. Dana was three when Andrew came through, and Rafael still talks about the mango trees on their street. We'd owned our house for only a few months when we pulled those accordion shutters closed for the first time, for Irma. Nobody in our house treats this as abstract.
How we watch
We keep it simple, and we keep it to a few sources:
- The National Hurricane Center outlook, once in the morning, from August on. I look at the 7-day outlook to see if anything is out there at all, and the 2-day when a trip is close.
- The National Weather Service forecast for the park itself, not just for Miami. The Keys, the Everglades and North Florida can be having three different weeks.
- Not much else. I've learned to skip the long-range model screenshots that get passed around. They make me nervous and they've never once helped me decide anything.
Our decision point is four to five days out. By then the forecast is usually clear enough to call it, and it's early enough that we haven't bought groceries, booked Isabela to feed Pickles or loaded the Pilot.
How we book in hurricane season
Most of our late-summer and early-fall bookings are Florida state park sites, because what it costs us to cancel is small and known. When we cancel a state park site ourselves, we've been charged a cancellation fee and lost the reservation fee. We were also told that if a park closes for a storm, reservations are refunded. That's good to know, but closure decisions come late, and the Keys especially can ask visitors to leave early. I'd rather pay a small fee on Wednesday than drive down US-1 on Friday hoping the park closes.
A few other habits:
- No prepaid, nonrefundable hotels between mid-August and mid-October.
- Tours, kayak rentals and snorkel trips get paid on the day, not ahead.
- Late-summer trips stay short, two nights, close enough to drive home in a few hours.
- For the big June trip, we bought a basic trip-cancellation plan, $41 on $873 of prepaid costs. We didn't need it. Whether something like that makes sense is a question for a licensed agent and your own numbers, not for a camping blog.
The Labor Day booking broke a couple of our own habits. We made it eleven months out, last September, right after a nice weekend, when two nights at Pennekamp sounded like the best idea anybody ever had. It still might be, some other year.
When we stay home
Our stay-home list is short. If there's a system in the outlook pointed anywhere near the place we're going five days out, we cancel. If we'd need to shutter the house that week, we cancel. If afternoon storms would keep the kids out of the water all weekend anyway, we think hard about whether it's worth the drive.
So this Labor Day we're home. The tent is in its bin, dry this time. Maya has already asked whether we can set it up in the living room, and given the week we've had, the answer is probably yes.
