Atlanta has a version most visitors never find. 

Not because it’s hidden, but because nobody tells you to go there. 

This episode is for the traveler who has already done downtown Atlanta, or who never wanted to in the first place. 

We’re heading east to Old Fourth Ward, where a former Sears warehouse became one of the most interesting markets in the South, a converted freight rail line became the BeltLine, and a 1924 hotel on Ponce de Leon Avenue still has a strip club operating in the basement that has been open continuously since 1965. 

This is the Atlanta that Atlantans actually use. 

The parks, the trail, the markets, the history sitting in plain sight on the walls of a building most people walk through too fast to notice. 

Come out here. Walk the BeltLine. See what the city looks like when it isn’t performing for tourists.

🌎 Keep Gallivanting With Me
If you liked this story, you’ll love what’s waiting on my YouTube channel: youtube.com/@ChadGallivanter
See more photos, behind-the-scenes, and upcoming trips on Instagram: instagram.com/ChadGallivanter
More travel stories, history deep-dives, and extras live at: ChadGallivanter.com

📬 Questions, ideas, or media requests? Email me at [email protected]

Anna Maria Island looks like a postcard from the outside. 

Golf carts, beach chairs, ice cream stands, the kind of place people drive past and assume they already understand. 

Get past that first impression and you find an island that has spent a hundred years quietly refusing to become something else. 

This episode follows Pine Avenue, where independent shop owners have held the line against the kind of development that turned so many other Gulf Coast towns into interchangeable strip malls. 

It crosses the bridge to Cortez, a working fishing village that has stayed a working fishing village, net houses and all, while the beach towns around it filled up with condos. 

Along the way there's a detour into AMI Coconuts and the inspiring, very real story of Robert McGraw, a stop at Fox Mercantile, and other unique stops you should add to your itinerary. 

The throughline is a question that keeps showing up across this podcast: what does it actually take for a small town to stay itself once the world finds out about it. Anna Maria Island and Cortez answer that question differently, and both answers are worth hearing.

🌎 Keep Gallivanting With Me
If you liked this story, you’ll love what’s waiting on my YouTube channel: youtube.com/@ChadGallivanter
See more photos, behind-the-scenes, and upcoming trips on Instagram: instagram.com/ChadGallivanter
More travel stories, history deep-dives, and extras live at: ChadGallivanter.com

📬 Questions, ideas, or media requests? Email me at [email protected]

Port Canaveral spent $23 million building a landmark. Now some commissioners want to tear it down. 

Exploration Tower opened in 2013 as a seven-story, sail-shaped building with an observation deck facing Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. 

It ran for nine years before closing for maintenance in 2022, and it hasn't reopened since. 

Today it costs the port roughly $250,000 a year just to sit empty, with a going lease rate estimated near $803,000 a year, numbers that have pushed the conversation toward a question nobody expected to be asking: should the tower just come down? 

This episode traces how one of the busiest cruise ports on Earth ended up debating the fate of its own front-door landmark. 

🌎 Keep Gallivanting With Me
If you liked this story, you’ll love what’s waiting on my YouTube channel: youtube.com/@ChadGallivanter
See more photos, behind-the-scenes, and upcoming trips on Instagram: instagram.com/ChadGallivanter
More travel stories, history deep-dives, and extras live at: ChadGallivanter.com

📬 Questions, ideas, or media requests? Email me at [email protected]

Florida has 1,350 miles of coastline. Most of it got sold. 

These nine places didn't. 

We're traveling Florida's entire Atlantic coast - from the Georgia border to the Florida Keys - hitting the oceanfront state parks and one Nature Conservancy preserve that most visitors drive right past on their way to the usual beach towns. 

Ancient coquina rock formations. A lighthouse that's been standing since 1825. A campsite thirty feet from the Atlantic. Water in the Florida Keys that looks like the Caribbean without leaving the country. 

This is the planning episode for anyone who wants the ocean without the crowds, the history without the hotel, and the beach without the bar next door. 

These parks protect some of the last undeveloped Atlantic shoreline in Florida - barrier islands that haven't been built on, limestone formations that have been shaped by the sea for thousands of years, and beaches where the biggest competition for a good spot is a nesting sea turtle. 

We cover what makes each park worth the drive, what you need to know before you book, and what most visitors miss when they get there.

🌎 Keep Gallivanting With Me
If you liked this story, you’ll love what’s waiting on my YouTube channel: youtube.com/@ChadGallivanter
See more photos, behind-the-scenes, and upcoming trips on Instagram: instagram.com/ChadGallivanter
More travel stories, history deep-dives, and extras live at: ChadGallivanter.com

📬 Questions, ideas, or media requests? Email me at [email protected]

Cedar Key, Florida has been coming back from the storms. 

But the recovery story on this island is not just about what was lost. 

It is about who chose to stay, who chose to invest, and who chose to open a business on a street that was still under construction. 

In this episode, Abby and I stay in the Eliza apartment on the second floor of the historic Lutterloh Building at 497 2nd Street, restored by realtors Caryn Stephenson and Mendy Allen as part of the Carmen Project, a two million dollar commitment to saving Cedar Key’s historic downtown before anyone was paying attention. 

The apartments upstairs are named after real women from Cedar Key’s history. 

The stories behind those names are worth the episode on their own. 

We walk Dock Street, where new businesses including Jaybirds Chicken, Dock Street Dips, and Sip and Sea Wine Bar are open and ready for visitors while the waterfront end finishes its rebuild. 

We shop at Main Street Mercantile and the showstopping For Shore boutique next door in Cedar Key’s oldest brick building. 

And we drive past the property on State Road 24 that Abby and I fell in love with six years ago, now reborn under new ownership as Old Florida Fish Camp. 

Cedar Key is not finished. It is not pretending to be. 

But it is open, it is moving, and the people who chose to bet on it are glad you came. 

This is Part Two of our Cedar Key series. Watch Part One first if you haven’t already.

🌎 Keep Gallivanting With Me
If you liked this story, you’ll love what’s waiting on my YouTube channel: youtube.com/@ChadGallivanter
See more photos, behind-the-scenes, and upcoming trips on Instagram: instagram.com/ChadGallivanter
More travel stories, history deep-dives, and extras live at: ChadGallivanter.com

📬 Questions, ideas, or media requests? Email me at [email protected]

Cedar Key, Florida has always known how to take a hit. 

But between August 2023 and September 2024, this small Gulf Coast island of roughly 700 people absorbed three hurricanes in thirteen months, and a Dock Street fire that tore through the heart of the town's waterfront economy one week before Hurricane Helene made landfall as a Category 4. 

This episode traces the sequence: Idalia, Debby, the fire, Helene. 

It looks at what the storms took from the clam farmers who produce more than ninety percent of Florida's farm-raised shellfish, the business owners rebuilding for the third and fourth time, and the residents who stayed when others left. 

It asks the question Cedar Key is still answering: how many times can a town rebuild before it becomes something else? 

Cedar Key is not a cautionary tale. It is a town mid-sentence. 

This is the first half of that sentence. 

Episode Two drops next. We go inside the recovery, stay in a 150-year-old building two blocks from where a 19th century homesteader is buried, and walk a Dock Street where new businesses are open before the old ones have finished rebuilding.

🌎 Keep Gallivanting With Me
If you liked this story, you’ll love what’s waiting on my YouTube channel: youtube.com/@ChadGallivanter
See more photos, behind-the-scenes, and upcoming trips on Instagram: instagram.com/ChadGallivanter
More travel stories, history deep-dives, and extras live at: ChadGallivanter.com

📬 Questions, ideas, or media requests? Email me at [email protected]

Winter Park calls itself the City of Culture and Heritage. This year, it's losing pieces of that heritage faster than it can decide what to do about it. 

Tuni's, a 40-year fixture on Park Avenue, was given 30 days to vacate after new landlord Benderson Development declined to renew its lease in favor of a national tenant. The shop isn't closing, it's searching for a new home in the district that built it. 

Miller's Hardware, an 80-year family-run institution on Fairbanks Avenue, closed for good this spring after the loss of the family's expected fourth-generation successor. 

And the 1939 Merrywood estate, designed by architect James Gamble Rogers II, now sits one City Commission vote away from demolition. 

A preservation trap is the quiet culprit: an ordinance that requires two-thirds of property owners to agree before a neighborhood can even apply for historic district protection, the highest bar of any city in Florida with a preservation law. 

Only two neighborhoods have ever cleared it. 

This episode follows the threads connecting a boutique, a hardware store, and a lakefront mansion, and asks what "Culture and Heritage" actually means when the rules make it almost impossible to protect either.

🌎 Keep Gallivanting With Me
If you liked this story, you’ll love what’s waiting on my YouTube channel: youtube.com/@ChadGallivanter
See more photos, behind-the-scenes, and upcoming trips on Instagram: instagram.com/ChadGallivanter
More travel stories, history deep-dives, and extras live at: ChadGallivanter.com

📬 Questions, ideas, or media requests? Email me at [email protected]

Historic downtown Winter Garden is one of Central Florida's most admired small-town districts. National Register status. A farmers market drawing thousands every week. Brick storefronts, the West Orange Trail, a boutique hotel built in 1927. A downtown that took decades to build into something people genuinely wanted to be part of. 

'And now, in the span of a few months, something is shifting. 

Three Birds Café. Driftwood Market. Writer's Block Bookstore. Polka Dotz. Ruby and Rust. 

Multiple locally identified businesses have announced closings or relocations, and the explanations keep pointing in the same direction - lease nonrenewals, ownership changes, rents that no longer make sense for the tenants who built the place. 

At least nine commercial buildings changed hands in the past year. More than $40 million spent acquiring 36 properties since 2015. 

A single February city commission meeting packed with residents demanding answers. 

This is not a story about one café closing. This is a story about what happens when a historic downtown becomes successful enough to price out the businesses that made it worth visiting in the first place. 

Downtown Winter Garden is not gone. But it is being tested. 

And how it responds to that test will say something important about whether a place like this can stay locally distinctive once it becomes premium real estate.

🌎 Keep Gallivanting With Me
If you liked this story, you’ll love what’s waiting on my YouTube channel: youtube.com/@ChadGallivanter
See more photos, behind-the-scenes, and upcoming trips on Instagram: instagram.com/ChadGallivanter
More travel stories, history deep-dives, and extras live at: ChadGallivanter.com

📬 Questions, ideas, or media requests? Email me at [email protected]

This summer, America turns 250 - and every city in the country has a story to tell. But St. Augustine's version is different. 

When the thirteen colonies signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Florida wasn't one of them. 

St. Augustine was British East Florida: a Loyalist city, a Loyalist fort, a Loyalist story. And that tension is exactly what makes it worth visiting right now. 

In this episode, we get into what historians call the 14th Colony, why a British flag is flying over the Castillo de San Marcos this summer, how three signers of the Declaration of Independence ended up imprisoned inside the oldest masonry fort on the continent, and what's on the calendar through July for anyone who wants to experience the 250th anniversary the way only St. Augustine can deliver it. 

From the "Florida at War" exhibit at the Governor's House to the public reading of the Declaration at the Ximenez-Fatio House on July 8, the actual date it was first read aloud in 1776, this is the anniversary programming that doesn't follow the usual script.

🌎 Keep Gallivanting With Me
If you liked this story, you’ll love what’s waiting on my YouTube channel: youtube.com/@ChadGallivanter
See more photos, behind-the-scenes, and upcoming trips on Instagram: instagram.com/ChadGallivanter
More travel stories, history deep-dives, and extras live at: ChadGallivanter.com

📬 Questions, ideas, or media requests? Email me at [email protected]

Before Henry Flagler pushed his railroad south and sold Florida as a destination for anyone who could buy a ticket, Frederick deBary was already selling it - quietly, selectively, and by invitation only.

His 1871 estate on the St. Johns River wasn't a hotel. There were no tickets. You came because Frederick deBary decided you were worth inviting.

One of those guests was the Prince of Wales - the man who would eventually become King Edward VII. He came to inland Florida, to a hunting estate on a river most Americans had never heard of, because in the early 1870s this was where the right people went. Not the coast. Not a resort. Here, on the St. Johns, where the air was clear and the game was plentiful and the guest list was as curated as anything in Newport or Saratoga.

He wasn't alone. Presidents Grant and Cleveland reportedly made the trip. The Astors came. The Goulds came. The Vanderbilts came. Frederick deBary built a machine for hosting, and the most powerful people in the Gilded Age used it.

DeBary Hall is still standing. It sits in a quiet corner of west Volusia County, off a road most people take to get somewhere else. But walk the grounds and you're standing where a future king stood - in the Florida that existed before Florida was a brand, back when winter here wasn't a vacation. It was a statement.

🌎 Keep Gallivanting With Me
If you liked this story, you’ll love what’s waiting on my YouTube channel: youtube.com/@ChadGallivanter
See more photos, behind-the-scenes, and upcoming trips on Instagram: instagram.com/ChadGallivanter
More travel stories, history deep-dives, and extras live at: ChadGallivanter.com

📬 Questions, ideas, or media requests? Email me at [email protected]