Sunrise, FL Week 2

We're fine & continuing to have a good visit here in south Florida.  Donna got in some good "girl" time with Katie & Mary on Saturday while Dave & I ate too much at Char Hut.  Sunday afternoon was when we finally got everyone together.  Everyone seems to be doing fine.  Weather's been nice and warm.  We're soaking up all the heat that we can before heading north.  Getting some rain at the moment, though.  Looks like it'll be over by tomorrow afternoon.

We've usually been eating at Dave & Mary's most evenings - sometimes Donna brings meals while Dave & Mary cook on other evenings.  Katie introduced Donna to Vegetable K's (salad/sandwich/wrap restaurant) on Saturday.  We've gone back twice so far this week.  The rest of our time is spent with Donna bike riding while I walk, grocery shopping, and many runs to the local knit shop as Donna branches out with her various knitting projects.  Hopefully, we can get out more with Dave & Mary this upcoming weekend.

Plans are to move north on Monday.  We plan on stopping at Fort Myers for a few days to visit a friend, and then back up to Orlando for me to attend a weekend Flight Instructor Refresher Course.  After that, general plans are Birmingham, Atlanta, High Point (NC), and reach Fredericksburg (VA) by the first of April.  At least that's the plan.  Later, David

Sunrise, FL

Markham Park & Rifle Range

We enjoyed our last day at Disney World by visiting the Earl of Sandwich (lunch), Ghirardelli (desert), and got to see the Monuments Men.  We left Disney Saturday and traveled down to sunny, south Florida to visit Donna's brother, wife and the rest of the family.  This time we traveled down the scenic route of US 27 instead of the Turnpike.  Took a little longer, but we missed the mixing bowl of the Turnpike and I-595.

Everyone seems to be fine down here.  We found Markham Park crowded, but it emptied out on President's Day.  Sunny and warm here.  We've even had a couple of days of low humidity, so far.  Got in a breakfast at Alley's Cafe, too.  Donna's gotten in a couple of bike rides, but it gets hot fairly early in the morning, so there's not a lot of long trips.  We're spending most evenings with David & Mary (and sometimes Katie).

Anyway, that's it from sunny, south Florida.  Until next week.  Later, David

Finally! Tigger!

Despite a rainy start, our second week at the Fort was a better week than the first.  First, Donna finally got to meet Tigger!  Happened totally by accident.  We were just wondering around the World Showcase at EPCOT when we noticed some character meetings just to the left of the American Experience area.  Off in the distance toward the back was that unmissable orange - Tigger.  And that seemed to be how this week played out.  Look around, pay attention, and enjoy the time.

We'd read that January & February were less crowded, and that's how we found EPCOT.  The trick was to set your FastPass+ times for later in the day.  Then get in early before the lines build on the more popular rides and get all your standby riding before noon.  Then use your FastPass+ on the popular rides.  Standby times on the less popular rides were short, so we'd ride those during the afternoons in between our FastPass+ times slots.

We managed - over two days - six rides on Soarin' and five on Test Track.  That's a record for us.  Restaurants weren't particularly packed, so you could adjust your reservations on the fly to eat at a more convenient time.  Updates to the rides were good though Energy is showing it's age.  Lots a changes made to cell phones since that program was first developed.  For

example, when's the last time you extended and stowed an antenna on your cell phone?  The aquarium photo (to the right) was our view from our table at The Coral Sea restaurant at The Sea.

In other news we got the trees trimmed.  It took awhile to get it coordinated.  But when we got it worked out, it got worked out.  Nice job on the trees by the Disney crew & they showed us a tool we could get that would collapse and fit in the trailer, yet extend to reach the high limbs.

So we had a great time this week.  We visited Downtown Disney, today, to eat at the Earl of Sandwich, watch the Monuments Men, and overindulge at Ghirardelli's one last time.  Tomorrow we get in High Tea at the Garden View area of the Grand Floridian.  Saturday, if everything works, we'll move on down to Markham Park & Rifle Range for a few weeks to visit David, Mary and the rest of the family down there.  At least that's the plan...until it changes.  Later, David

The rides at The Grand Floridian

Fort Wilderness 2014

We left Gulf State Park on Saturday.  Spent the weekend at Lake City, FL, then moved on down to Walt Disney World for a couple of weeks.

Getting into the campground was just an irritable exercise this time.  Our first assigned campsite was taken by someone else - a first for us.  Think of

checking into a hotel and arriving at your room and finding someone else moving into it.  It wasn't that great of a site for us, anyway, so back to the Outpost we went to get a new site assignment.  Size-wise the new site was find, but once again we're on a curve with the truck pointed the wrong direction for the site we need to back into, tree limbs are intruding well into

the campsite, and there's a poorly placed tree across the road where the front fender of the truck needs to go for us to maneuver around the tree limbs and back into the site. (and you can see the damage to the tree where others have hit it.) So Donna held the limbs back as best as she could and into the site we went.  It wasn't until I noticed all the scratches on the trailer did I realize just how bad backing through the tree limbs had been.  Let's just say it left me with a "less-than-magical" Disney experience.  Had I known it was going to be that bad, we'd gone back to the Outpost and tried to find another spot.

Anyway, we're here now, visited Downtown Disney where Donna designed two new tee shirts (about the only way to get anything with Tigger on it), ate lunch at Earl of Sandwich, got desert at Ghirardelli's, ate dinner at the California Grille at the Contemporary Resort, watched the Magic Kingdom's evening fireworks from the Contemporary Resort's observation platform, and got in a day at the Magic Kingdom.

We used our day at the Magic Kingdom to learn the new Magicband/FastPass+ system.  We made a few mistakes, but when it works it's pretty slick.  We're still new to the Magicband/FastPass+ process, but once you get your tickets linked to your Magicband, things work pretty well.  You'll need to have a working smartphone with Disney app installed to take max advantage of all the benefits.  At least for today, the system didn't seem to like our smartphone's Android 4.4 Operating System version as we needed to restart our smartphone after we made any changes to our plan.  However, late in the afternoon the Disney app needed us to sign in. After that new sign in, things seemed to go well.

The advantage to all this is that you can do a significant amount of planning and scheduling of things before you arrive at a park.  The downside is that to get the maximum benefit, you have to plan ahead.  That's not to say that there's no "just-wing-it-when-you-get-there", but you're gonna find your choices limited if you just walk into a park and then decided what you want to do.  And we have no idea what happens if you don't have a smartphone (and Disney app installed) with you.  Of course the system is new and it's still got some growing pains.  We got a lot of help from the FastPast+ kiosk cast members, but we did see people having issues with their tickets.  I can only imagine what happens when your Magicband goes bad.  And you just know that's gonna happen.

So we've still got a week+ to go.  We'll get two more days in at Epcot, and we'll go back to Downtown Disney.  I'll work on removing more of the scratches on the trailer.  And we're gonna purchase some tree trimming equipment and assist Disney with it's tree trimming needs.  We can use these tools at other campgrounds, so it'll be a good investment for us.  And we can provide our services at no charge to the campgrounds.  Walt would be happy...maybe.

(BTW:  we did ask Disney to trim the trees on our site and they did - three limbs per Donna.  But it's not good enough to get us past the remaining tree limbs without hitting the tree across the street.  So we're gonna do the tree trimming on our own.  There's a reason Good Sam no longer rates Fort Wilderness a 10/10/10 campground.)

Anyway, that's our plan.  Until it changes.  Later, David