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
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
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