A little mini break to St Augustine beach camping to test our kit out before we hit the road for good......good thing we did cos we learnt some stuff:

1) when they say beach camping, it's not! there's a forest between you and the sea.

2) Our tyre blew and we're now $80 out of budget, which means beans on toast for the rest of this week!

3) No one warned us abt the farking raccoons.....worse than any scavenger we've come across, we left our site for 5 mins to go brush our teeth, to return to a campsite with a broken cooler box, and our steaks gone. These pesky little fekkers sit in tree's above us, planning their next move whilst we sat in the car for about an hour like two pathetic scaredy cats! they even pulled a zip open to get more food out another bag. So, we are not used to wildlife in camp sites (UK camping is far more tranquil with grassy fields and placid cows the only danger to content with!

So I slept with my pen knife in one hand and the rubber mallet in the other....slept all of 2 hours - so, with no sleep, no food left, a flat tyre, you can understand why the wife and I only started speaking to each other 2 days after we returned to airconditioning, a double fridge, a bath and a bed with duvet.....lord help us the rest of this mammoth camping trip across america! It's the everglades next week, if a fekking aligator comes as close as 10 meters, I'll have that mallet ready! We thinking about joing the Nation and buying guns....