Family Camping at Magnolia Park...Our last real camping trip?

Due to the short stay at Southern Palms, we enjoyed a nearly two week stay at Magnolia Park!  This was kind of a nice ending to our nomad lifestyle - a long stay in a public park, our favorite, peaceful, kind of camping.  Our next sites will be month+ long stays at proper RV parks where we're properly paying a monthly rate, with the ultimate goal of moving the RV onto our potential property as soon as we have water and sewer hooked up.  But more on that later.  

Our campsite at Magnolia Park - right on the path to the bathroom!

The kids appreciated the easy access to the bathroom.  We had lots of fun cooking out, playing games, playing catch, driving on the Lake Apopka Wildlife Drive, and searching for roosting peacocks at night!

Playing Telestrations around the campfire

With my sister and nephews in front of the first large alligator
we found on the wildlife drive

This alligator was so close!

If you zoom in you might be able to see that there was an
alligator's nest at the far side of the water.  The kids wanted to 
come out to see but my sister insisted on having them hold hands
constantly so they wouldn't fall in near alligator mom.

Aaron got his old chainsaw up and running while we were at the campground - a feat that required lots of cleaning and a couple small replacement parts.  We'll need the chainsaw for land clearing once we actually own some land!  My parents brought Aaron a bunch of his tools from the farm in West Virginia - a small enough set to fit in the RV basement but large enough to put together a shed so we can go get a larger load and have room to store the tools.

Aaron with his working chainsaw

We enjoyed our last peaceful nights at Magnolia Park reflecting on our nomad RV journey and making sure to enjoy some good campfires!  Aaron and I have some conflicting views on our future in camping - while we still have an RV, I'd like to run out to a public park every couple months or so, but Aaron is completely focused on building a house (once we can!) and stopping driving the RV so we can drop the expensive RV insurance...we'll see how things end up working out!  We've decided we enjoyed our 3.5 years on the road, seeing the sites and meeting neat people.  We are both disappointed that crowding and costs made it impractical for us to really get out and explore the country the way we thought we would...of course everyone has different tolerances for these things, we know plenty of people are going out and exploring despite these issues, but it didn't work out for us.  We also hated the thought of being away from family for a year or more that would have been required for a real round the country trip.  But we enjoyed the adventures we did take, the big Texas trip being a highlight, and also just being exposed to this whole other aspect of living that we hadn't understood before.

Our last campfire

This peacock had no fear walking near
running cars

The peacocks finally put on a display as we were leaving!  With
the peahens gone, they did not display very often.  As far as I 
could tell, these two were trying to intimidate a squirrel.

So what's the future of this blog?  I think I'll keep it going as long as we have the RV.  Hopefully we will get out camping a few more times before we sell it, and if we can ever close on this property we'll have some building adventures to share while we're living in the RV on the land.

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

Family Camping at Magnolia Park

We spent a week and a half back at one of my favorite parks - Magnolia Park.  Though as I think back on all the Orange County Parks, I realize it's really hard to pick a favorite.  They each have unique traits that make each special and fun.  But I digress.  We enjoyed the peacocks yet again, and this time I talked to the ranger when we checked in about them and discovered that the three girls and one juvenile boy are actually all siblings - two girls from last year's brood and a girl and a boy from this year's - and the third peahen we saw last year was actually the mom for all of them and was killed by a car near Thanksgiving.  Thankfully she produced three new peahens before passing, or the park would have been in bad shape with just five peacocks and no peahens!

All siblings!

We actually switched sites midway through our visit this time.  I made the mistake of STARTING our reservation on a Saturday, which meant when the booking window opened, most of the sites were taken by people who were camping for the weekend starting on the Friday!  We ended up at a site (5) on the side of the campground we'd never stayed at before, which was farther from the restroom and lacked privacy.  After a few days we switched the other side of the campground, to a great site right around the corner from the restroom with a huge open area in the back for a tent...important for the family camping coming up!

First Campsite - #5 - it's a little short for us and there's another
campsite immediately at the left side of the photo, but it worked
just fine for a few days!

Second campsite - #17 - to be fair it's pretty close to the camp
host on the right side there but you can't see them through the
RV; you can just see the retaining wall that provides some recessed
privacy and the large spot in the back for the tent - also, much more 
room for the car in the front!  (this was taken before my sister arrived)

My sister and her family came to camp with us our second weekend there and we had a great time!  The kids loved 'peacock hunting', especially at night when we found the peacocks and peahens in the trees and even got out at the right time one evening to watch them flying up to roost for the night!  The peahens seem to have an easier time of roosting what with their lack of a huge tail.  We took the kids to the Lake Apopka Wildlife Drive - they had a blast!  They kept count and found 51 alligators!

In the back of my sister's truck with all
the kids (and my sister) - Aaron kept
out of the sun in the front with my
brother-in-law

Aaron got out of the truck and got way too close
to this alligator to get this picture!

We also took the kids to Kelly Park to float down the creek at Rock Springs...but we cheaped out and didn't get tubes.  Turns out that a strong flowing creek really freaks out the kids :-(.  I didn't think about it ahead of time, but I suppose that feeling of being pulled along the water could be really scary the first time you feel it.  As a result, we couldn't convince the younger three kids to just lean back and float - rather, the twins clung to me the whole way down and the youngest clung to her mother.  Unfortunately if you AREN'T floating there are a lot of shallow shin-killing rocks scattered along the whole route - I have the bruises to prove it!  The water was a little cold for the kids as well, so this excursion was a bit of a bust but I think they still had an overall positive experience seeing the crystal clear water (see my previous post) and experiencing something new.

The rest of the weekend we just hung out at the campground - the kids enjoyed the multiple playgrounds and large open fields for football and we all enjoyed some fireside time.

Burning marshmallows at the campfire

My sister's dog found the peacocks 
fascinating too!

 

I have to close with a few more peacock photos just because they're so awesome :-).

I'm not sure how well this comes out, but
what you're looking at is the juvenile
peacock trying to fan his tail feathers out -
it's a little funny to me because the poor
kid doesn't have much going on there yet!

Ok this isn't a peacock but this guy
cracked me up because he came and 
perched on this pole RIGHT outside
my car window while I was waiting
for Aaron to pull around to the dump station
- I guess he thought I might hand him nuts
out of the car window?

This post is quite a bit late because I came down with some nasty cold right after we left the park...hopefully there won't be such a delay before the next post!

Peacock Baby!!

Ok, so less of a baby and more of a teenager...but we'll get to that.  We're finally back in Orlando, land of sun and warmth and Disney!  Our first stop (since we had to be out of the Thousand Trails system for a week after our last stay) was at Magnolia Park, an Orange County park sadly a bit of a hike to Disney World...that said, I think it might be my favorite county park, so I was still happy to stay here!  Now, you may recall from our stay last year that this park sports a decent population of peacocks - much to our surprise, this year we saw a juvenile peacock in the crowd!  We noticed fairly quickly that there was one more peacock than last year, and as we watched the peacocks we realized there was a not-quite-right colored male hanging out with the females all the time.  Must be the new baby!!  Very cool.

Our campsite at Magnolia Park

The juvenile - he was skittish so I had to zoom in from 
far away - note the speckles on his breast (the adults don't
have those).

The juvenile peacock with the peahens - note how he has a much
bluer head than the females, which is why I'm assuming he's a male

For completeness, an adult male

We're just making an assumption on the juvenile male based on the fact he didn't exist last year and looking at his emerging colors, but honestly I had trouble finding information online so I *could* be wrong, don't quote me!  I did see something that said male peacocks don't begin developing their tails until 2 years old, which would be consistent with his presumed age and current tail growth (nonexistent).

We tried out our new waste tote for the first time!  This allows us to haul wastewater from our holding tanks to the dump station at parks like this where we're not on sewer, without having to drive the RV to the dump station.  Before we bought this, I used to collect each dishwashing's water and carry it in a bucket to the restroom's outdoor sink to pour down the drain, so this was a huge improvement!  It was great to use the RV sink like normal and only have to have Aaron haul wastewater once during our stay.

Hauling the tote to the dump station

With just about a week left before our Disney annual passes blocked out for the holidays, we spent several days in Disney World even though it was a long-ish toll-filled drive.  We were able to experience Epcot's long-awaited new Space 220 restaurant, ride Remy's Ratatouille Adventure, and see the holiday decorations at all the parks.  

Inside Space 220 at Epcot - the idea behind this restaurant is that 
you take an 'elevator' to a space station, and once there the 'windows'
show you a view of Earth far below, with astronauts and spacecraft
floating by.

Also at Epcot - one of the many bronze statues Epcot put out 
for the 50th anniversary celebration.  This is Rocket from 
Guardians of the Galaxy.

Decorations at the main pond in Hollywood Studios

Christmas decorations on Main Street, USA (Magic Kingdom)

We'll see Animal Kingdom at our next stop.  Overall this was a great stay and we're glad to be back in Orlando!