Published Updated 17 min read Alex Slyadnev
Down the Atlantic coast, five days in the Florida sun, and home through the Blue Ridge Mountains. A ten-day loop built around wild ponies, lighthouses, Lowcountry oysters, springs and an old-time mountain jamboree.
📅 18–27.06.2026 🚗 ~3,500 mi by odometer 🛏️ 10 days on the road ⚡ electric Cadillac Escalade IQ
I didn't want the drive to be the price you pay for the vacation. So instead of two days of interstate, I gave myself the scenic version: the ocean side going down, the mountains coming back, and a simple rule for the long days, one good stop and then back on the road. Here's exactly how it went, with every address, every meal, and the bits no one tells you.
The idea of driving from New York down to Florida and back had been with me for a long time. I almost committed to it last fall, but in the end I never set off, and this time the whole thing came together quickly and fairly spontaneously. What anchored the entire trip was a timeshare offer at Sheraton Vistana Villages in Orlando. The companies behind these resorts run a nice promotional deal for new guests. For a symbolic price you get a few days at their villas, as long as you come and listen to a presentation about how the timeshare works. That offer is exactly what I used, and it set the point in Florida I needed to reach.
A timeshare is a form of vacation ownership rather than buying real estate outright. You make a one-time purchase of the right to use a resort apartment for a set period every year, usually a week. For that right you pay an annual maintenance fee. Most timeshares belong to exchange networks such as Interval International or RCI, which let you swap your week for another resort or other dates around the world. People buy them for predictable, quality lodging year after year, while the main downsides are the yearly fees and how hard they are to resell.
Flying down to Florida struck me as a boring way to do it, so I decided to drive south along the ocean coast and come home through the mountains instead. I had no desire to simply grind from point to point without stopping. I put together the route you see below so that the drive itself would show me a different America, one unlike New York in its food and its views. I split the places into the ones I had to see and the optional ones worth a look if time allowed. My planning skills failed me badly here, and I did not reach even half of my must-see list. A trip that looked beautiful on paper turned out completely different in real life.
You might think I had already made things hard enough by choosing the awkward format of driving from New York to Florida. Yet I made it even harder when I took an electric Cadillac Escalade IQ on the trip. This is a nearly four-ton electric SUV with a 205 kWh battery and a stated range of about 465 miles, which is 748 kilometers on the EPA cycle. It puts out up to 750 horsepower and 785 pound-feet of torque, and its fast charging on an 800-volt architecture pulls up to 350 kilowatts. In ten minutes that kind of charging returns roughly 116 miles of range. On paper it is the perfect machine for a long road, and in practice it added a whole story of its own to the trip.
Let me be honest in advance about one difficult part of this drive. The only day I genuinely worried whether I would even reach my hotel was the very first one. Back then I had no idea whether I would find any charger at all in rural Virginia, on the Eastern Shore, at the southern tip of the Delmarva Peninsula, between the wild ponies and the tunnel. For the other nine days the only inconvenience of the electric car was the charging time, since I refueled not in fifteen minutes like on gas, but for about an hour a day. That is enough backstory, and from here I will tell everything day by day, starting with the first.
Thu 18 June · New York → Virginia Beach
The first day is mostly about getting south, but down the Delmarva Peninsula it never feels like a slog. You slip past Delaware's beaches, onto a thin farm-and-marsh spit between the ocean and the bay, and end the day plunging under the sea through one of the great drives in America.
New York → Cape Henlopen and Lewes → Chincoteague ponies → Cape Charles → Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel → Virginia Beach. About six to seven hours of driving on paper.
In practice the late start rewrote the whole schedule, and reality went quite differently.
People can be loosely divided into two types by their relationship with time. Some arrive at the airport hours before boarding and pack a week in advance, while others show up fifteen minutes before the flight and throw their things in a bag in the last half hour. Some hit the road at the crack of dawn, and others are reliably late to their own plan. I usually leave the house at six in the morning for long trips, but this time I broke all my habits, and that largely shaped how the whole route went. Instead of the planned seven o'clock start I kept waking up closer to nine, and so I drove past half the places I had wanted to see, watching them through the window with a wistful look.
I had left New York a day before the trip itself, spent the night at a friend's place near Philadelphia, and set out from there, though not at seven in the morning but noticeably later. I deliberately skipped all the beautiful spots in Philadelphia, New Jersey and Maryland (you can read about my trip for the best blue crabs across Maryland and Washington at this link), because they are home turf for me and I have been there many times. I wanted to see and feel the America and the culture I did not yet know, so I reached my first stop, Cape Henlopen State Park, only around eleven in the morning.
🚫 not visited📍 Smyrna, Delawarebetween Philadelphia & Cape Henlopen
↪ ~25 min off US-13 · 🕒 daily, dawn to dusk · 💲 free
A 16,000-acre coastal refuge that is mostly tidal salt marsh. Its main draw is a 12-mile one-way auto loop with three observation towers, where thousands of migrating shorebirds and waterfowl feed within view of your car. It is best at low tide and in the soft early-morning light.
🅿️ Free parking at the refuge entrance and the loop pull-offs.
📍 Lewes, Delaware
📫 15099 Cape Henlopen Dr, Lewes, DE 19958 · ☎ (302) 645-8983
🕒 dawn to dusk · 💲 $20/car out-of-state, $10 DE residents · Tower 7 free to climb
🅿️ Large paved lots at the beach, the Point and the fishing pier.
Cape Henlopen greets you the way any American park or refuge does, with a huge number of trails for walking and cycling. It is a good place to come with an RV for the night and wander a long while where the pines grow straight out of the sand, breathing in the ocean breeze and the smell of evergreens. Locals love it for the beaches too, and families from nearby towns gather here to spend a whole day by the water. For me on this trip the park stayed only a short stop, a chance to look around and move on.
One of those towers, Tower 7, is open to the public, so I climbed it. It is a concrete fire-control tower from the Second World War, built to spot enemy ships off the coast. From the top you get a full circle of dunes, ocean and bay, and the easiest way to feel that view is the 360 video below, which you can drag and turn in any direction.
360° video — drag to look around
⛴️ Cape May → Leweswhat I did not know while planning
🕒 ~85-min crossing · year-round, ~35 sailings a week · 🚗 cars, RVs, bikes (up to 100 vehicles)
If you are coming down the New Jersey side, the ferry can even shorten the drive a little and become a small adventure of its own. Fares depend on vehicle class and number of passengers, and reservations are recommended in summer and on weekends. I only learned about it once I was already in Lewes.
📍 Google Maps🔗 cmlf.com☎ 800-643-3779
My next stop was the town of Lewes, just five minutes from the park, and under normal circumstances this is the perfect place for breakfast. But because I had spent too long pressing my pillow, breakfast had already turned into lunch, and there was no point stopping for coffee, since I do not drink it after one in the afternoon. During the planning, though, one spot kept coming up again and again under the name Lewes Oyster House, so I dropped it into Google Maps and drove straight there.
🚫 not visited📍 Lewes, Delaware
Historic Lewes has two genuinely good specialty coffee spots on 2nd Street, barely thirty seconds apart. I do not drink coffee after one in the afternoon, so this time I had to walk past both, but in the morning they are well worth a stop.
Gaia Coffee Co.Small-batch single-origin roaster, the serious specialty pick in town · 108 2nd St📍 Google Maps
Notting Hill RoasteryRoasts 80+ kinds of beans on site, next to a beloved bake shop · 124 2nd St📍 Google Maps
🅿️ Metered street parking on 2nd St (~$2/h) plus free municipal lots near the center.
For many years now I have shot food as a food photographer, and that work has taken me through an enormous number of restaurants around the world. On those shoots I have been inside dozens of Michelin restaurants in the United States, in Europe and in Asia, so I have plenty to compare cuisines and plating against. Over the years I have formed a steady sense that American restaurants live in a coordinate system of their own, noticeably different from the European and Asian ones in style, atmosphere and the very logic of the place. It is simply a different world, not a question of better or worse, and I know the New York scene especially well. On trips through Miami, Philadelphia, Las Vegas and Los Angeles I saw that the difference between states is not all that large, and that is exactly why you can trust my words about this restaurant.
Lewes Oyster House became for me a taste of good, quality Europe in a tiny, almost forgotten town. The place occupies the old Walsh Building from the 1930s, and inside everything is done with taste, from the oyster bar to the cocktail list. I ate beef tartare and chased it with fries and truffle aioli, adding a few fresh local oysters, and none of it fit in my head with such a tiny town. I would expect a restaurant like this in New York or Los Angeles, in Barcelona or Berlin, in Hong Kong or Istanbul, but certainly not here. Only later did I learn that the chef of this place studied in New York and worked under Daniel Boulud at the Michelin-starred restaurant Daniel, and that explained a lot. Back then I did not yet suspect that almost every place I would meet further on would be of roughly the same level, and it was this restaurant that set the foundation for the whole culinary part of the trip.
📍 Lewes, Delawareunexpected find
📫 108 Second Street, Lewes, DE 19958 · ☎ (302) 644-7258
🏆 USA Today Restaurants of the Year 2026 · Best of Delaware 2024 (best oysters & cocktails)
In the historic 1930s Walsh Building, opened in 2022. Chef Sean Corea trained at the Culinary Institute of America in New York and worked under Daniel Boulud at the Michelin-starred restaurant Daniel.
After such a delicious, genuinely incredible lunch I decided to walk around this lovely little town, and it did not disappoint me at all. Lewes is called the first town in the first state, since Delaware was the first to ratify the American Constitution, and that history is felt in its colonial architecture. The old houses, the neat little streets and its own museum of historic buildings turn an ordinary stroll into a quiet pleasure worth stopping for.
Having enjoyed the food at Lewes Oyster House and the beauty of the first town in the first state, I drove on and turned off to see the wild ponies that live right on the ocean shore. This was another refuge on my way, where you can take in the lush nature of Virginia and walk the long, wide Atlantic beaches.
Sadly, the ponies themselves, the very reason I came here, I never really got to see up close. Or rather, I did see them, but very, very far away, grazing peacefully about a kilometer from me, at the very edge of the marsh. On my trips I carry a single lens with a fairly wide angle, and there is a logic to that. On one hand, this mobility spares me from hauling a pile of glass and deciding a hundred times a day which one to choose for a given scene, and on the other, it is exactly in cases like these ponies that I simply cannot photograph them properly. Still, this approach keeps me incredibly mobile, and at any second I can pull the camera from my backpack, take a few frames and run on along the route.
Main camera: Fujifilm X-T4 with a Fujinon XF 23mm f/1.4 lens (35mm equivalent on full frame)
Quick and spontaneous shots, photo and video: iPhone 16 Pro Max
Video: Insta360 X5, which shoots in 360 degrees and up to 8K. You can mount it on the car or hold it in your hand, hit record and not think about the angle, then choose the shots you need later in editing
Drone: DJI Mini 3
A note about the drone: in the US its use is heavily restricted. Commercial filming requires an FAA Part 107 certificate, while hobbyists must pass the TRUST test and register any drone heavier than 250 grams. Flying drones in national parks is completely banned, and violations can bring very large fines.
🚫 not visited📍 Wallops Island, Virginianext to Chincoteague
↪ ~10 min off US-13 · 🕒 Thu–Sat, 10:00–15:00 · 💲 free
One of the most underrated free stops on the whole peninsula, just a few miles from active launch pads. The center holds real flown sounding rockets, a moon rock and NASA mission artifacts, and on the right day you can catch pre-launch activity. The Thursday-to-Saturday schedule is exactly why most travelers drive past it.
🅿️ Free on-site parking.
Already at the refuge I noticed the battery charge dropping noticeably, and for the first time that day I seriously thought about charging. I made my first stop in a neighboring town, by the Hampton Inn & Suites Chincoteague-Waterfront, and while the car was charging I walked out onto the pier and took the photo and the little drone clip you see here. Unfortunately the charging was very slow, so I had to set off again having gained only about four percent.
The main problem was that I would reach my overnight stop in Virginia Beach on less than ten percent of charge. Given the rural country all around, I had serious doubts I would find any decent fast chargers along the way. As a backup I kept Cape Charles in mind, where there were no fast chargers either, but under that plan B I could always stay there for the night and charge in peace.
🚫 not visited📍 Onancock, Virginiamidway down the Delmarva
↪ ~5 mi west of US-13 · 🕒 town, always open
A quiet harbor town founded in the 1680s and known as the gem of the Eastern Shore. It has galleries, cafes and a working creek-side wharf, and it makes an easy thirty to forty-five minute break to stretch your legs halfway down the peninsula.
🅿️ Free street and wharf parking.
I drove along Route 13, admiring the views and the beauty of this wonderful state, and at the same time I could not shake an anxious thought. The whole trip could fall apart at any minute if I made a single mistake, took a wrong turn or missed the one I needed. But this time I got lucky after all, and somewhere in the middle of the Delmarva Peninsula I came across a Tesla fast charger that for some reason was not shown on the maps. Out of sheer joy that the car could finally get a proper charge, I set it to a full hundred percent, and once the battery filled and it was clear the trip was saved, I sped on with a light heart.
🌙 passed at night📍 Cape Charles, Virginiabefore the bridge
↪ ~3–10 min off US-13 · 🕒 park dawn–dusk · 💲 Kiptopeke ~$7–10/car, Cape Charles free
Two last stops before the bridge. Kiptopeke State Park hides nine WWII concrete ships sunk in 1948 as a breakwater, a surreal half-submerged ghost fleet visible from the beach in five minutes. The little town of Cape Charles has the only free, west-facing public beach on Virginia's Eastern Shore, which makes it a rare place to watch the sun set over the water.
🅿️ Lots inside Kiptopeke; free parking along Bay Avenue in Cape Charles.
📍 Kiptopeke📍 Cape Charles🔗 Kiptopeke site
The incredibly beautiful Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel I crossed late in the evening, after sunset, so unfortunately I have neither photos nor video of it. I reached my hotel, the Sheraton Virginia Beach Oceanfront, almost at midnight and walked straight into a scandal.
I am a gold member of the Marriott club system, and when booking I counted on the usual perks. I mean things like early check-in or late check-out, though those were not really what I needed. What I truly hoped for was just one thing, a good room as a privileged guest of the chain, but the reality turned out far worse than my expectations. They put me in a lower-class room, with cockroaches, no window and a dirty bathroom, and all I dreamed of by then was finally laying my head on the pillow. The thought that a cockroach the size of a fist would share that very pillow with me never crossed my mind at that moment.
There is a great deal more I could tell about this hotel. For instance, how I waited more than forty minutes for anyone at all to appear at the front desk, how I argued with them over changing the room, and how I later wrote a letter of complaint, to which the hotel simply deleted my reservation. All of that I will leave on the conscience of the managers, but I will certainly not recommend the Sheraton Virginia Beach Oceanfront, and I will honestly advise you to keep your distance from it. Worn out by the hard road and the awful service, I finally went to sleep, knowing full well that the next morning would once again begin with a decent delay.
Day 2 — down the coastal King's Highway to Charleston — coming next.
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