Chad Gallivanter

In the oldest city in America, a few steps north of Ripley's, there is a garden shed in the parking lot of the Old Town Trolley Welcome Center. Inside it, Jason Pappas makes lamps by hand while you watch. Bright, glowing, customized plastic lamps assembled piece by piece from the same repeating shapes, built to order out of recycled material that traces back to a 1960s design. Jason is not a...

There's a plaque by the pool at a hotel on North Atlantic Avenue that most guests walk right past without a second look. It ties back to the seven men who became America's first astronauts, years before the world knew their names, and it's not the story you'd expect. This episode traces that thread through the rest of Cocoa Beach: Ron Jon Surf Shop, the flagship that grew from...

In 2015, Dolly Parton recorded a song called "My Place in History," sealed it inside a chestnut wood box at Dollywood's DreamMore Resort, and left instructions not to open it until January 19, 2046, her hundredth birthday.  She died this past August.  The box is still sealed. I toured both of Dolly's resorts, DreamMore and the newer HeartSong Lodge, to see what she built into t...

For over two decades, thousands of commuters have driven past an 18-story glass tower on I-4 in Altamonte Springs without ever seeing anyone go inside. Construction started in 2001. The man behind it, a local Christian broadcaster, promised a debt-free headquarters built entirely on donations. No bank loans. No pressure to hit a deadline, because there wasn't supposed to be one. That's n...

Walk far enough down the oldest street in the United States and you reach a spot where a building used to be. For over a hundred years, 7 Aviles Street in St. Augustine worked for a living: a jail, then a machine shop, a tackle store, an antique shop. In 2024 the owners applied to fix it up. What followed instead was a slow, public demolition, worked out one HARB meeting at a time, until nothing o...

On one of the busiest stretches of road in Orlando, across the street from a lake and not far from a SunRail stop, sits a hundred-year-old building appraised at roughly $6 million.  It's survived a power-outage era, a full renovation, and a second life as a stage for ballet and opera.  It has a broker, a rebrand, and a long line of interested buyers.  And for more than a decade, it hasn'...

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...

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...

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...

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&apos...

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, restore...

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,...

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...

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 shi...

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....

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 -...

Chad returns to Dollywood with a season pass and a specific mission: NightFlight Expedition, the largest single attraction investment in the park's history, opening later this season.  But walking through a park you've known since childhood means seeing more than what's there now.  The Harvey water clock still runs behind the Back Porch Theater, marking time in what used to be the f...

The Flagler Beach Pier is gone - and for a lot of people driving past on A1A, that's a reason not to stop.  This episode asks whether that assumption is right.  Hurricane Ian knocked out the old wooden structure in 2022. What's going up in its place is taller, wider, and built entirely from concrete.  But while those pilings go in, the town is still operating - the Saturday farmers marke...

St. Augustine, Florida has been nominated by USA Today's 10Best Readers' Choice Awards for Most Walkable City to Visit in the United States - and this episode makes the case for why it should win. Voting is open now through June 15, 2026, and you can cast one vote per day at the link below. This isn't just a campaign plug. St. Augustine has a walkability argument that no other city...

Pigeon Forge, Tennessee has no shortage of ways to take your money. But The Island does something different.  It doesn't charge you to walk in. Parking is free. You can spend an entire evening there without ever making one clear decision to spend anything at all.  And yet somehow, people do.  A FloridaRentals.com analysis of TripAdvisor reviews ranked The Island sixth on a list of the biggest...

Plant City sits between Tampa and Orlando, and most people treat it like a pass-through. In this episode, we slow down and take a closer look at what’s actually here. We start inside the original 1909 depot, now the Robert W. Willaford Railroad Museum, where the town’s entire reason for existing comes into focus. From there, it’s a walk through a downtown that still operates the way it was built t...

Just south of Gainesville, Micanopy looks like a place you pass through. A few antique shops. A quiet main street. Live oaks stretching over the road. And then you keep driving. But that misses the point entirely. In this episode, we take a closer look at how this small inland town came to exist in the first place. The story begins long before storefronts and cafés, with a landscape shaped by Payn...

Lakeland isn’t just what you saw in Part One.  There’s a second layer to this city that doesn’t sit out in the open, the places you don’t pass by on accident, the ones you have to know are there.  In this episode, we head deeper into Lakeland to find the spots that give the city its staying power.  That starts at the historic Silver Moon Drive-In Theatre, one of the last operating drive-ins in Flo...

Lakeland, Florida is easy to overlook if you only see it from Interstate 4. Most people pass the exits on their way to Tampa or Orlando and assume they already know the place.  But once you slow down and spend time here, a very different picture starts to emerge.  In this episode of The Gallivanter Podcast, Chad explores ten clues that reveal why Lakeland might quietly be one of the most interesti...

Most people visit Sanford, Florida the same way.  They stroll along First Street, enjoy a drink or dinner downtown, and walk the Riverwalk beside Lake Monroe. It’s an easy place to spend an afternoon, and one of the most charming historic districts in Central Florida.  But Sanford’s story runs much deeper than most visitors realize.  Long before Orlando became the center of the region, Sanford was...