On the first Sunday of the year, Dana took the new paper calendar off the fridge, spread it across the kitchen table and handed out pens. Blue for her hospital shifts. Red for baseball. Green for school breaks. Maya, who is eight and takes color-coding more seriously than anyone in this house, asked for a fourth color just for camping, and got orange. Nico, who is five, got a pencil and permission to draw a tent on any weekend that was still empty.
There weren't many. That's how our camping year gets made. It isn't a wish list. It's whatever is left after two jobs, two school calendars and Florida weather take their share.
The fixed pieces
I teach PE at a public high school in south Miami-Dade, and I've been an assistant baseball coach since 2017. Tryouts are the last week of January. Games run from mid-February to late April, and if we're any good, the playoffs go into May. There's practice most weekdays and games on weeknights and some Saturdays. From the end of January until the season ends, I don't plan anything I can't cancel, and I don't plan much.
Dana is a respiratory therapist. She works three 12-hour day shifts a week, 7 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., and she self-schedules about six weeks out. That six-week window is the real planning horizon in our house. A trip that's on the calendar before her schedule is due costs nothing. A trip we think of later means trading a shift with a coworker. She's good at trades, but she doesn't love asking, so we try not to make her.
Then school. Maya is in third grade and Nico is in kindergarten, and the district calendar hands us the long weekends, Thanksgiving week, winter break and a spring break at the end of March. Summer runs from early June until teachers go back in August, minus the last week of July, when I run a youth baseball camp.
Last comes the weather. From June through September, Florida tent camping is mostly off for us. Dana made that rule after Memorial Day weekend at Fort De Soto last May, when the dew point sat at 76 and none of the four of us slept. We call it the 70 rule: if the forecast dew point is over 70, we don't tent camp in Florida. It has cost us some weekends. It hasn't cost us any more sleep.
What's in orange so far
- MLK weekend, January 18 to 20: Long Pine Key in the Everglades, two nights at $25 a night, booked a few weeks ago. Our third trip there.
- Presidents' Day weekend, February 15 to 17: Blue Spring State Park, two nights, right in manatee season. It's the one weekend of baseball season we get, because our head coach never schedules anything over the holiday.
- Spring break, March 27 to 30: Curry Hammock State Park in Marathon, three nights. Dana booked it last April at 8 a.m., eleven months out. We have a tournament Monday to Wednesday of that week, so we leave Thursday.
- June 15 to 20: five nights at Elkmont in the Great Smoky Mountains, booked on Recreation.gov in December. The rest of that trip is a blank page, which is my homework for the spring.
- Labor Day weekend, August 30 to September 1: two nights at John Pennekamp in Key Largo, booked last September. A Keys trip in the middle of hurricane season is a bet, and we know it.
Thanksgiving is at my parents' house in Ocala, like always, and we'd like to add two nights of camping somewhere near them. Winter break is wide open. Maya wants to see frost. Dana, who hates being cold more than anyone I know, said she'd discuss it in December.
Reading the whole year at once
With the entire year on one table, the pattern is plain. Our best camping weather, December through March, lines up almost exactly with baseball season. The months when I'm free, June and July, are the months a Florida tent turns into a sauna. So we split it. Short Florida trips in the cool months, squeezed around the edges of baseball. One big summer trip somewhere with elevation. Maybe a springs weekend in July, if the forecast lets us.
The other lesson is to book early and accept that we'll sometimes cancel. Florida State Parks open sites eleven months ahead, and the beach and Keys parks go fast. We'd rather hold a spot and risk a small fee than want to go and find nothing. Every booking and every receipt goes into the trip log, a green spiral notebook in the Pilot's glove box. When this year is over, I want to be able to say exactly what it cost us, down to the bags of ice.
One piece of homework comes before any of it. Our old tent leaked through an all-night downpour at Flamingo in November, and we can't take it to Long Pine Key with a straight face. This weekend we go tent shopping.
Nico's pencil tents ended up on eleven weekends, including the Fourth of July and two random Tuesdays in October. We left them all on the calendar. Dana says one of them might even happen.
