One of America’s most quintessential road trips often starts by renting a convertible or RV in South Florida and organizing a tropical journey to the southernmost point in the continental United States. Visitors to this island oasis encounter a lifetime’s worth of natural wonders preserved by our State and National Park Services, along with plenty of fun in the sun, eco-adventures, and an opportunity to disconnect from the real world.

Has anyone not heard that the Colorado River through Grand Canyon National Park is one of the best places on Earth to paddle or float? Or that the New River Gorge National River has one of the best one-day whitewater paddles in the National Park System? If you’ve heard of those, and other iconic paddling spots in the park system, perhaps you are looking for something new, and not so thick with other boats that you’ll slap each other’s paddles. Let us offer you some suggestions, in no specific order.

Horace Kephart roamed the Smoky Mountains in all seasons, but he held springtime here in high esteem.

They were strangers to each other, collected by common calamity, disfigured, mortally sick, banished without sin from home and friends, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote about the Kalaupapa Leper Colony in 1889.