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. 6d ago

    He Pitched for Billy Mays. Now He Builds Lamps in a St. Augustine Shed.

    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 typical St. Augustine shopkeeper. He spent years on the road working home shows, fairs, and stages, including a stretch alongside Billy Mays as one of the "But wait, there's more" pitchmen.  Then he stopped.  He chose a smaller radius: a shed instead of a stage, a daily routine instead of constant travel, and a chance to be home with his kids every night. Six years ago, Abby and I bought a lamp here for a small balcony. This year we came back for one to light the porch.  This is the story of why this is the most unusual souvenir you can carry home from St. Augustine, and the man who decided to stay put and build it. 🌎 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. 6d ago

    Cocoa Beach, Florida: The Astronaut Secret Hiding in Plain Sight

    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 a single storefront into the largest surf shop in the world, and the Florida Surf Museum tucked right beside it. A few blocks over, the brand-new Wizard of Oz Museum has landed in Cocoa Beach's new Museum District, bringing an I Dream of Jeannie exhibit with it, a nod to the sitcom astronaut who beat the real ones to television screens. Cocoa Beach never tried to outgrow the decade that made it famous. It just kept building on top of it. 🌎 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. Sep 17

    Dolly Parton Locked a Box in 2015. It Won't Be Opened Until 2046.

    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 these places long before she was gone: her wardrobe on open display in HeartSong's Acoustic Lobby, a chapel named for the country doctor who delivered her, a childhood home replica furnished by her own family, and two of her retired tour buses (one free to walk through, one a bookable overnight suite).  I also found out what's already planned for the park's future, and what happens to five resorts' worth of investment now that she's not the one signing off on them. Some personal history along the way: I was a local reporter in Knoxville covering her Imagination Library back when it was still a small regional charity, long before it became the program it is today. Watching HeartSong and DreamMore get built almost a decade apart isn't something most people get to see up close. 🌎 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. Sep 5

    Why Florida's I-4 Eyesore Has Been Under Construction Since 2001

    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 not how it worked out. Completion dates came and went: 2003, 2007, 2017, 2023. Somewhere along the way the building stopped being a construction project and started being something else: a meme, a T-shirt, a Jeopardy clue.  Central Florida gave it its own name: the I-4 Eyesore. This week, how a building outlasted four presidents and three governors, and what's actually happening inside it right now. 🌎 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. Sep 2

    St. Augustine's Old Jail Nobody Could Save

    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 of the front was left standing. It's already happened once before, just up the same street, and what went up in its place was built to look exactly like what was lost. This episode traces what's actually gone from 7 Aviles, what a rebuild on Aviles Street really replaces, and why this keeps happening on the oldest street in the country. Is a convincing rebuild still preservation, or does a place need the actual walls, cracks and all, to still mean anything? Let me know where you land in the comments. 🌎 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. Aug 12

    Orlando's $6-Million Underwater Landmark

    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't had a single tenant.  This episode traces the Ivanhoe Building's full arc: from 1897, when Judge John M. Cheney built Orlando's first water and power operation right on the shore of Lake Ivanhoe, through its 1923 rebuild by the newly formed Orlando Utilities Commission, its 35 years as a working power plant, its second act as a temporary home for the Orlando Ballet, and the mold scare that emptied it out for good in 2013.  Then we get into why nobody's closed a deal since.  Not neglect. Not money.  A problem that was baked into this spot before Orlando ever built here at all.  If you've driven past this building on Orange Avenue in Ivanhoe Village and wondered what's actually going on inside, this one's for you. 🌎 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. Aug 8

    The Atlanta That Doesn’t Need Tourists

    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 info@ChadGallivanter.com

  8. Jul 30

    Anna Maria Island Is Still Proof Old Florida Exists

    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 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
    57
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Chad Gallivanter
  • Show Website
    Chad Gallivanter

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