We moved to Iowa six years ago.
Not for a job. Not for the winters. For family.
Carma’s parents needed care, and we were the ones to do it. So we went. We settled in. We made Iowa home — at least for a season.
We always knew it was a season.
We hit the road on December 15th.
After two full months of prepping our house to sell, selling furniture on FB Marketplace, moving things into storage, and finally closing on the sale — we were done. The house was sold. We were officially homeless. And it felt amazing.
We had already fallen for Oak Island.
The beach. The bikes. The quiet.
And then we discovered there was a lighthouse, in Caswell Beach, right next to the town of Oak Island. Of course we had to go!
Wowsa. What a day!
Not one lighthouse. Two.
Not every stop on a road trip is a destination.
Some stops are just… the road.
After the busyness of the holiday coast, we needed to exhale.
Panama City Beach was just the place.
Not every lighthouse is easy to get to.
We’d come east to Gulf Shores, but the Pensacola Lighthouse pulled us back west. Forty minutes back into Florida. Worth every mile.
The lighthouse sits inside Naval Air Station Pensacola. You have to enter the base to reach it.
Gulf Shores surprised us.
In the best possible way.
Right at the tip of a long, narrow peninsula — where Mobile Bay meets the Gulf of Mexico — sits Fort Morgan.
It’s been there since 1833.
We weren’t planning to fall for Mobile.
It was supposed to be a lunch stop, a place to break up the drive from Gulf Shores,AL to Bay St. Louis, MS. But the ferry from Fort Morgan to Dauphin Island was down for maintenance, so we had to drive through Mobile anyway.