Back in Orlando: Magnolia Park

Although our original intent was to stay over on the West Coast near Daytona this winter, we quickly discovered that there were no other lovely short-booking-window public parks nearby like the ones in Orange County where we could spend our time between the Thousand Trails parks.  Rather than going through the immense difficulty of hoping for last minute reservations on the coast, we decided to just bounce over to the Orange County parks, and so in mid-December we headed over to Magnolia Park again for our inter-Thousand Trails time.   

Our campsite at Magnolia Park

Upon arrival we immediately noticed a distinct LACK of peacocks...they've always been a highlight of our visits here, but we didn't see any at all for the first day, and afterward only saw a few males around the park for several days.  We finally had a rainy day wherein all the peacocks hid from the rain under the shelters, and we found all 5 males...but still no females.  Sadly, we found out that both of the remaining females had been hit by cars since our last visit, just like their mother (peahens seem to have a strange desire to cross the busy road near the park...).  I asked if they had any plans to bring in more peahens to keep the flock going, but at the moment they don't :-(.

Peacocks hiding from the rain!

As a partial consolation for the missing peahens, there is an extremely friendly cat who has adopted the campground (I asked, and the workers were not sure where she came from).  She made the rounds to each campsite begging for food and affection.  I was happy to supply the latter!

Campground kitty!

She wasn't pleased when I stopped petting 
her and headed inside the RV

Aaron did an even better job with the Christmas lights at this campground, taking advantage of the palm tree on our site.

New Christmas lights

We took advantage of our proximity to Orlando to go view the Christmas trees at Disney Springs.  While there, we went by the Lego store to pick up a Lego set for a nephew for Christmas and enjoyed their life-size creations!

"Once Upon a Toy" tree

Moana tree - complete with Hei Hei!

Grogu (Baby Yoda) at the Lego Store

Aaron and the Hulk at the Lego Store

We also went to see Avatar: The Way of Water at a local (non-chain) theater, which offered movies at an amazingly reasonable price for this day and age!  The movie's visuals were AMAZING - if you haven't seen it yet, go see it in the theater where you can properly appreciate the 3D.  At one point I felt like I was sitting in the middle of a huge aquarium.  So amazing.

Avatar: The Way of Water

I had mentioned the hydraulic jack sinking at our previous campsite...to our dismay it sunk again at Magnolia Park (even though the campsites are paved, we backed in enough to allow our car in front of the RV, which left our back jacks on dirt).  It seems that the destroyed jack pad just doesn't distribute the weight of the RV very well.  Going forward we need to put boards underneath the jack or something along those lines...we hate to pay the big bucks to replace the jack pad that isn't as resilient as advertised, but we have to do SOMETHING!

I tried to get a picture of the hole the jack created -
that's most of Aaron's hand able to fit into the hole