Chad Gallivanter

Chad Gallivanter
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Places & Travel

Chad Gallivanter is your guide to the overlooked, the historic, and the just-plain-fascinating corners of travel. Based in Florida but chasing stories everywhere, Chad blends investigative curiosity with a storyteller’s pacing - digging deep into local history, cultural quirks, and the moments that shape a place’s identity. Each episode unfolds in deliberate, well-structured segments, weaving archival research with on-the-ground travel insight. Sometimes it’s a deep dive into a city’s forgotten past. Other times, it’s a smart, sensory-rich exploration of where to go now. Always fact-checked, always engaging, and always told like a story you can’t stop listening to.

  1. Jul 14

    Cedar Key: The Women Who Brought It Back

    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 info@ChadGallivanter.com

  2. Jul 8

    Cedar Key: One Week Between the Fire and the Hurricane

    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 info@ChadGallivanter.com

  3. Jun 22

    Winter Park's Preservation Trap: Tuni's Pushed Out, Miller's Gone, Merrywood Could Be Next

    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 info@ChadGallivanter.com

  4. Jun 19

    One Man Is Buying Downtown Winter Garden. What Happens Next?

    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 info@ChadGallivanter.com

  5. Jun 11

    Your Guide to St. Augustine's America 250 - From a City That Stayed Loyal to Britain

    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 info@ChadGallivanter.com

  6. Jun 3

    How Dollywood Is Still Marking Time More Than 40 Years Later

    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 front entrance. Blazing Fury is still running, maintained but changed. The train still follows the same route through terrain that keeps filling in around it.  And the Chasing Rainbows Museum, one of the most artifact-dense experiences the park ever offered, has given way to something bigger and more cinematic.  This is Dollywood as a returning visitor sees it, in layers. 🌎 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 info@ChadGallivanter.com

  7. May 28

    The Most Walkable City in America Might Be in Florida. Here's the Proof.

    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 on this list can make: its streets were designed for human foot traffic in 1565, more than 200 years before the United States existed. The city's compact historic core - laid out according to Spanish colonial planning principles that prioritized pedestrian movement - puts the Castillo de San Marcos, the Cathedral Basilica, Flagler College, the Plaza de la Constitución, and dozens of restaurants and galleries within a few blocks of each other. That's not modern urban planning. That's 460 years of infrastructure that was never designed around a car. In this episode we break down what the USA Today campaign actually is and how voting works, why St. Augustine's case for walkability is fundamentally different from every other city on the list, and where to actually walk when you're there - including the corridors most visitors never find. We cover St. George Street and the historic downtown, Aviles Street (the oldest documented street in the United States), the Matanzas bayfront seawall, the Lincolnville Historic District and its Civil Rights history, the Uptown district along San Marco Avenue, and King Street's concentration of Gilded Age architecture. St. Augustine has landed as high as 4th on this list in previous years. This year it should be number one. Go vote. 🌎 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 info@ChadGallivanter.com

  8. May 28

    Flagler Beach Without the Pier: Is It Still Worth the Stop?

    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 market, the Gallery of Local Art, Swillerbees, the Compass Hotel by Margaritaville.  Locals are still showing up. Visitors are still finding reasons to pull over.  We talk to the people who are here now, watching the build and choosing to stay.  This is Flagler Beach before the pier comes back. And the question is whether the town is worth showing up for before it does. 🌎 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 info@ChadGallivanter.com

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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

Chad Gallivanter is your guide to the overlooked, the historic, and the just-plain-fascinating corners of travel. Based in Florida but chasing stories everywhere, Chad blends investigative curiosity with a storyteller’s pacing - digging deep into local history, cultural quirks, and the moments that shape a place’s identity. Each episode unfolds in deliberate, well-structured segments, weaving archival research with on-the-ground travel insight. Sometimes it’s a deep dive into a city’s forgotten past. Other times, it’s a smart, sensory-rich exploration of where to go now. Always fact-checked, always engaging, and always told like a story you can’t stop listening to.

Information

  • Creator
    Chad Gallivanter
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    46
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Chad Gallivanter
  • Show Website
    Chad Gallivanter