Dinner Shows and Goodbye Central Orlando!

We wrapped up our last stay in 'central' Orlando for the season.  Central is in quotes because technically it's Kissimmee, but it's the area close to all the amusement parks, so 'central' for tourism purposes ;-).  Again we stayed at Sherwood Forest, this time right across from the laundry facilities, which was very convenient!

Final campsite at Sherwood Forest

The Epcot Flower and Garden Festival started shortly after we arrived, and we went a couple days and did the 'Garden Graze' - buy 5 items from the food vendors to receive a free treat.  The food was excellent and we received another fun cup with the completion!

Epcot has many fun topiaries for the festival

50th Anniversary cake!

50th anniversary flowers!

Winnie the Pooh was so cute!

Our reward for completing the Garden Graze

With our seasonal departure imminent, we evaluated what all we needed to do that we'd been talking about all season and ended up with three dining reservations.  First, we returned to Garden Grill at Epcot - one of our favorite restaurants on Disney property.  The food is homestyle and delicious, the restaurant rotates through part of the Living with the Land exhibit, and characters come visit during your meal.  It did not disappoint!

Pluto!

Next, we booked dinner and a show at Capone's, an establishment right down the road from the RV resort.  This had the theme of "1931 gangland Chicago" - set in a speakeasy.  The food was actually quite good and you were allowed to choose from a menu (unusual for a dinner show - normally you eat what they decide to give you or go up to a buffet).  The entertainment was a bit cheesy but very fun.  We thought it was an excellent value for the money and quite enjoyed our evening.

Some of the singers and dancers

This didn't come out great in the low light, 
but it was a very interactive show and
they had you practice stereotypical 
Italian family motions and sayings so 
you could fool the cops

Finally, we returned to Medieval Times - also right down the road from the RV resort.  We had been here several years earlier, but it is one of my favorite dinner shows and so we decided to return since it was so close.  We cheered for the red and yellow knight, who sadly did not win the tournament, but the entertainment was great as always.

In the lobby with a picture of the 'queen'
(a year or so ago they changed the 
script and now there is a queen instead
of a king)

The knights marching in with the queen at the start of the show

Finally, we also stopped by Shingle Creek Regional Park, also right down the road.  It was a nice little park, I wouldn't say it's worth a special trip, but if you're in the area it has some pretty walks.  There are a couple of historic buildings and informative signs - including the fact that Shingle Creek is so named because shingles were made from the cypress trees in the area.

The bridge over Shingle Creek

As we close out this phase of our seasonal travel, I have some reflections on our winter activities.  This year, as you may or may not have heard in the news and social media, Disney World was INSANELY busy.  You might have noticed we only went to Epcot in this post...that's because the other parks were way too crowded to be enjoyable for folks like us that want to wait in a couple of reasonable lines and stroll around unhindered.  I'm not sure if this is pent up COVID vacationing, an expected side effect of the 50th anniversary celebrations this year, or an unexpected side effect of the new Genie+ paid FastPass, but the lines this season were unbearable.  Usually in February the lines are short and crowds are low and the parks are quite fun to visit, but not this year.  And this isn't just our biased opinion - it was commented on by all the Disney YouTube channels we follow as well.  So we're thinking next year we'll drop the annual passes (gasp!) and find some other way to entertain ourselves in the winter.  This will likely still center on Florida (we determined everywhere else is too cold), but we're thinking we'll take more of a tour around the state and maybe get ourselves organized enough to pop into a few state parks along the way.  It's a sad thing to think about because we did really enjoy Disney, but it's a good thing for you as a reader because my posts will probably become more interesting next year ;-).  

In related news, we have trips planned for the spring in Georgia, Kentucky, and Indiana so things will get more interesting here soon!

Christmas and Tropical Palms

We just wrapped up two weeks at our favorite Orlando-area Thousand Trails park - Tropical Palms Resort.  This resort is quite hard to get into and, having now booked out the rest of our stays through the winter, I can tell you this is the only time we'll make it in here this season.  In addition to being the closest Thousand Trails park to Disney World, it is also the best maintained park with the most amenities of any Thousand Trails park in the Orlando area.  The laundry room alone is worth the stay!  For the first time we weren't even able to book the 'elite' site here, so we were 'stuck' in a premium site nearer to the back of the park.  Still a great experience, but because of ongoing construction (they're expanding the park - good news for next year!) it was a pain to get to our site.

This is a terrible picture of our campsite but the only 
one we managed to take...

We only had a couple of days to take advantage of the proximity to Disney World before our annual passes were blocked out for the holiday season, but we made the most of them!  We saw the Candlelight Processional at Epcot for the first time and it was just beautiful.  Andy Garcia hosted the evening we visited and he had some entertaining commentary, but overall it was just a reverent telling (and singing) of the Christmas story.  It was absolutely beautiful and definitely put us in the Christmas spirit!  We also saw the new Harmonious nighttime show at Epcot (impressive!) and finished our cookie stroll.

The Candelight Processional

Close up of Andy Garcia reading the Christmas story

Our reward for finishing the cookie stroll!

We also spent a few hours at Animal Kingdom, catching the new Kite-Tails show (Lion King version).  It was neat!  Lots of handheld and jetski-held kites.

Animal Kingdom Christmas tree

Simba in the Kite-Tails show

We enjoyed several quiet days at Tropical Palms after we couldn't go to Disney World, and for Christmas itself we drove (just the car) back 'home' (to the adjacent towns where we grew up) to Virginia to spend a couple days with both sets of parents and most of our siblings (Aaron's brother and my sister).  It was great to see everyone but the drive home the Sunday after Christmas was awful, so if we end up doing this again we definitely need to figure out an alternative RV storage in Florida so we can travel some different dates.  This trip kind of came up last minute when my sister decided to spend Christmas with my parents, and we'd already booked all of our stays through the holiday season so we were a bit inflexible in our travel plans.

All ready for Christmas morning at my mom's house (pre-kid
destruction)

Merry Christmas everyone!  And a happy new year!

A last week-ish in Orlando

We just spent our last week-ish in Orlando before heading north for some general maintenance and repairs.  We stayed a second time at the Thousand Trails Orlando RV Resort.  Our stay this time was MUCH better than our previous stay last year.  Last year we made the mistake of taking a pull-through site when it was offered (usually these are better sites!), and ended up in the absolutely worst part of the park in a site where we couldn't put out our window awnings without hitting the RV next to us.  This year we were prepared and told the we wanted a back-in site, and we lucked out and got a spot in the brand new section of the park (new since last year) with wide level concrete pads and ample space between RVs.  Much improved!

Campsite at Orlando RV Resort

The first week we were there we visited Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom, and Epcot in our final 'goodbye' tour.  It seems several school systems were already in spring break, as the park reservations were sold out every day.  Fortunately I had booked the 3 parks months in advance, but we could only sit on 3 reservations with our annual passes, and once we used those three everything was sold out and I couldn't get any others for the week.  In one bright side of COVID-19 restrictions, the park capacity limits meant that the parks didn't actually feel much more crowded, if at all, compared to our last visits in the fall before our Texas trip.

With the Lady & the Tramp topiaries
at the Flower & Garden festival in Epcot

Living with the Land ride at Epcot during the Flower & Garden Festival

Chip inside the Land Pavilion at Epcot

Inside the butterfly garden at the Epcot Flower & Garden Festival

In front of Spaceship Earth

Baby giraffe at Animal Kingdom!

Magic Kingdom!

The second half of our stay we enjoyed seeing my sister and her family, who were there on Spring Break and managed to find an AirBnB on the approach road to our RV park.  Together we visited Hollywood Studios, the first time at Disney World for my niece and nephews!

All of us in front of the Millenium Falcon at Galaxy's Edge.  
Our first time with matching Disney shirts!

We had an awesome day, park open to park close, and the kids had a ball!  My sister's family is planning to move to St. Augustine this summer, so she and my brother-in-law went to look at houses and we babysat the kids at Gatorland!  Our nephews are obsessed with alligators and snakes so this was a perfect option.

Hunting for snakes on the 'Swamp
Walk'

Wrestling an alligator!

After this stay, we'll start heading north to West Virginia to do some semi-annual maintenance on the RV and work on a few more repairs on our repair wish list.  At the moment we're planning for six weeks at the farm before hitting the road again, so get ready for some more 'RV repair' posts!

Always a Project

After our delightful stay at Fort Wilderness, we left vacation mode and got back to more normal day-to-day life.  Our next stop was Sherwood Forest, a Thousand Trails resort where we stayed for two weeks.  We've stayed here before and it's definitely our favorite Thousand Trails campground in the Orlando area, both because of its proximity to Disney and the dryness and levelness of the sights.

Campsite at Sherwood Forest

It may be difficult to tell in the photo, but we had a site at the end of a row, which meant we had a little more privacy and a little more space than most of the other campsites.

While we were parked in Sherwood Forest we finally finished waxing the RV to protect all the new paint we'd applied in West Virginia.  And of course Aaron found plenty more projects to work on...

One of the furnaces stopped working.
Here Aaron is diagnosing it - ultimately
he just had to clean the electrical 
connections to fix it.

One of many loose tiles in our bathroom.  Aaron ripped them
all up....

...hacked all the grout off the back...

...and reseated and regrouted them.  Amazingly none of the 
subfloor was damaged, we're not sure why the tiles were loose.

All done!

Aaron also spent a lot of time working on the air conditioners...

He added insulation and taped the
corners around the intake/outlet boxes

And replaced one of the fan motors and one of the control boards

We had a couple of fun animal buddies in Sherwood Forest...

This red shouldered hawk frequented 
the area between our campsite and
the resort's laundromat

Random neighborhood cat who liked our campsite

And of course what everyone wants to know...how does COVID make this all different?  Well, the main pool was closed, the clubhouse was closed, all the resort activities were canceled, and you weren't allowed in the office (you knocked on the door and someone came outside to assist you).  Since we didn't regularly use any of these services, it didn't have a huge impact on us.  

We celebrated Aaron's birthday while staying in Sherwood Forest with some birthday muffins and a fun day at Disney.

Birthday breakfast

Obligatory birthday buttons at Disney

In front of Star Tours at Hollywood Studios

We saw the cavalcades at Animal Kingdom for the first time - they traverse the river - cavalcades are one wonderful thing that has come from the COVID response at Disney.

Character cavalcade in Animal Kingdom

And of course as soon as Halloween was over, the Christmas decorations went up at Disney World!

Main Street USA, Magic Kingdom

Goodbye Orlando!

Our magical winter has finally ended - this Sunday we finally left the Orlando area.  It was a great winter full of Disney, Universal Studios, and the occasional county park full of wildlife.  Our last site in Orlando was Winter Garden (Thousand Trails) - a fitting end as this was also our first campsite in the Orlando area.  We liked our site quite a lot better this time - it was more conveniently located than our first site and we were nestled between two other temporary campers (rather than the permanent residents who flanked us last time).  The site was also very level, always a bonus!

COVID-19 is certainly making big news everywhere and thus far we've managed to narrowly avoid related closures.  My sister's birthday cruise occurred just before all cruise departures were canceled.  Disney World's last day before closure was the day we left Orlando.  The RV park put in some stringent restrictions right as we left.

Activities board at the RV resort

So far we haven't heard of any closures in the parks we've chosen on our trek back north, so fingers crossed our 1.5 week trip is uneventful.  Some of you might have heard that we have been planning a trip to Europe in late spring...of course that is looking less and less likely with every passing day. 

Of course, as with the rest of the country the grocery stores in Orlando have been greatly affected.  Unfortunately I was legitimately out of toilet paper and toilet bowl cleaner when we went to Walmart...I found a secret stash of toilet paper in a corner of Walmart but had to settle for the off brands remaining for the toilet bowl cleaner.  We don't have enough space in the RV to hoard anything even if we wanted to, so it's an interesting conundrum living in an RV during this crisis.  Overall though, spending our time in an RV, hanging out at our fire ring in small campgrounds, seems like a good way to try to socially distance ourselves.

Toilet paper aisle at Walmart

Back to happier (sadder? non-virus related at any rate) thoughts...it was hard to leave Orlando - we've had a wonderful time in the area.  We made great use of our annual passes, and it is strange to think about NOT just deciding to hop over to a theme park for a few hours for some fun.  We FINALLY made it on Hagrid's Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure and it was AMAZING.  We also slipped in a ride on the brand new Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway at Hollywood Studios, caught the Epcot Flower and Garden Festival, and rode the rest of the rides at the various parks this week that we hadn't been on yet.  We're debating whether some sort of visit to Florida should become part of our annual plans...time will tell.  Bye for now though Orlando!

Epcot Flower and Garden Festival

Hagrid's Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure

Goodbye Magic Kingdom!

Goodbye Universal Studios!

Goodbye Epcot!