Bill Frederick Park & Universal Studios

We spent a week at Bill Frederick Park, maintained by the City of Orlando.  We picked this park partially because it was available (it's crazy hard to find spots to park the RV in Florida unless you're planning a year in advance) and partially because it was very well rated on Campendium.  I have to say that this is the first park we've been to that didn't meet our expectations.  It was a nice park, nicer than many we've stayed at, but it wasn't as good as we expected based on the reviews.  Most of the sites were extremely unlevel (we would have had to put our rear tires on 6 inch blocks to actually level the RV), and the road through the campground itself was narrow and windy (our tires were off the road around every curve).  There was a nice walking trail but they had blocked access to it from the RV campground.

Example Leveling Problems from a Neighboring RV

On the plus side, most of the sites did have a view of Turkey Lake, and once you did escape from the campground to access the walking path, the path was very nice.  We also met a sweet cat near the children's zoo on site.  The major focus of this park was frisbee golf - every spare square foot of the park not involved in another use was dedicated to it, with 3 different courses.

How many frisbees have been lost in the lake on this hole??

Bill Frederick also had the benefit of being relatively close to Universal Studios.  We had grand plans to 'rope drop' the parks and make it into the Hagrid's Motorbike Adventure without waiting 2+ hours, but two days it was near freezing in the morning, and the day that we did make it at opening time the ride was closed until mid afternoon with mechanical problems.  Still, we made it to the park a couple days and enjoyed the rest of the two parts of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.  We'll try for Hagrid's again soon.

Triwizard Spirit Rally

We also made a trip to our favorite restaurant on Universal's CityWalk - Toothsome Chocolate Emporium.  Toothsome has AMAZING milkshakes - each with a separate dessert on top (think cake slice, cupcake, piece of pie), but this time we opted for one of the other massive desserts - a banana cream sundae - which consisted of basically a banana split with a piece of banana cream pie.  Amazing!

Moss Park & SpaceX Launch

We just spent a week at Moss Park near Orlando - an Orange County-maintained park.  It was GREAT!  The park felt very much like a state park - the sites were wooded and spacious, each site had a grill and a fire ring, everything was well maintained, and we had access to two lakes and some nice hiking trails.  The roads and sites were fairly well-maintained packed sand, and at least our site seemed pretty level.  Most of the sites on the east side of the campground had some sort of lake view (including ours) - and our site had immediate access to the fishing pier (not that we fish, but it's always fun to walk out over the water).  Overall the campground was fairly quiet, though the family sites (with multiple RVs per site) got a little loud during the afternoons on the holiday weekend.  Only downside - no sewer!  We managed to last the whole week without having to empty our gray tank though!  We're getting better at this water conservation stuff :-).

Moss Park was a little far from the amusement parks, but we still spent a bit of time at Disney.  We particularly enjoyed dining at Garden Grill and the Spirit of Aloha dinner show.

I have to give a particular shout out for Spirit of Aloha.  We had our doubts about going due to some questionable reviews online, but we thought it was amazing.  The first half of the program is kind of a goofy story and some hula dancing for the kids to participate in, but the second half of the program is a demonstration of native dances from various Pacific islands, and the dancers were incredible.  The strength and control you have to have to do the dances is remarkable.  Not to mention they finish off with the most impressive fire dancing show I've ever seen.  The food was quite tasty as well.  Now, the down side is that the seating is open air (there's a roof but no sides) and the stage is out in the open, so apparently they do have to cancel the show for inclement weather, but if you are able to book it once you're already in Orlando and know the forecast (we booked our seats a couple days ahead, no problem), I don't see a downside.

The last thing we did while staying at Moss Park was drive out to the Kennedy Space Center to see the SpaceX Crew Dragon Launch Escape Demonstration.  This unmanned test was designed to show that if the launch had to be aborted for some reason, the crew capsule ("Crew Dragon") could disconnect from the rockets and return safely to earth.  Neither one of us had ever seen a rocket launch live before, so this was very cool.  Unfortunately the clouds were so thick that we could not see the fireball when the rockets were disconnected, but we could see the gigantic plume of steam from when the second stage rocket fell to the ocean and exploded.  The platform was 3.5 miles away, so although we could see the launch pretty well, it was hard to capture on camera.

Orlando - First Two Weeks

We spent our first two weeks in Orlando at the Winter Garden RV Resort, part of Thousand Trails.  This is definitely the most parking-lot feeling RV park we've been to yet - the sites were very narrow, not a lot of trees, and ours was even missing a picnic table.  However, we had full hookups (in contrast to what the website told us when we booked), and it was centrally located in Winter Garden close to just about everything.  So it served its purpose for us.

The first couple days we were there we checked out some Christmas decorations at the amusement parks.  We caught the Macy's-style Christmas parade at Universal Studios, which was pretty awesome.

We also had dinner at the Hoop-Dee-Doo Revue (dinner show) at Disney's Fort Wilderness.

Aaron was able to get the molding repaired that we broke back at C.B. Smith park:

We were also here long enough to order the rest of the solar panels Aaron wanted to install, so we did that and he was able to get them installed.  Now we have three solar panels on our roof, which will give us a little extra juice if we're boondocking.

We're looking forward to the crowds reducing at Universal Studios and Disney World in the coming weeks!

Heading to Orlando

We made a leisurely trip north from the Everglades to Orlando with a couple stops along the way - much more relaxing than our mad rush down.

Our first stop was at C.B. Smith park in Broward County.  This was a pretty impressive park - especially for a county park in the middle of a city.  It had a sprawling lake in the middle of it with lots of little inlets, lots of picnic pavilions, and a water park!  Unfortunately the water park was closed until late March, so we didn't get to try it out, but we enjoyed strolling around the rest of the park.  We had a site right on the water.

In the morning a Muscovy Duck came right up to our dining room window as we were sitting inside eating breakfast.  I assume he actually knew that was the right place to come up and beg - I was impressed.

Unfortunately we had a bit of trouble exiting the park and ran over a curb that popped some molding off the bottom of the car...and we didn't realize it until we made it to the next stop.  We found the part online and Aaron will have to fix it once we're located somewhere long enough to order the part.

Our second stop was at Torry Island Park in the City of Belle Meade.  Again we had a site right on the water.

We liked this park even better - though it didn't have the pavilions and of course no water park, it was pretty remote and there was a decent spacing between the sites.  It had a really great 'nature' trail around the central pond and an observation tower that let us see the open agricultural land for miles and miles.

While we were here, we met a couple who had the same basic model RV as ours, just 2 years older.  We spent a whole evening talking to them about our experiences in our RVs.  Their coach was in much better shape than ours as it had been garage-kept for its entire life.  They had done some nice upgrades inside and I felt quite inspired.  Aaron was able to help them out with some suggestions to address some of the issues they still wanted to fix.  This is the first time a fellow camper has invited us in (and we invited them in to our coach the next day), and we had a great time with them!