Back at Rose Bay...for the last time??

After Thanksgiving we headed back to Rose Bay RV Resort for a couple weeks.  Our original plan for the winter, which I've probably mentioned before, was to stay at the three Thousand Trails parks in the Daytona Beach area to be a bit closer to my sister, since we dropped our Disney Annual Passes and thus had no reason to be tied to the Orlando area.

Our campsite at Rose Bay

This time around our campsite was on mushy ground (due mostly to recent rainfall) and we only had 30amp power.  We were completely surprised that the RV park even HAD 30amp power (large RVs like ours and certainly all the permanent sites prefer 50amp power), but I couldn't remember if somehow I'd selected a 'value' site or something 2 months ago when I booked it, and we can survive on 30amp, so we didn't pursue it.  Last season one of our pads on our stabilizing jacks ripped off, and Aaron attached the remnant to the jack to keep it level this summer, but this was our first indication that it's really not the same...the affected jack, with a much smaller surface area, just kept on sinking farther and farther into the soft ground.  We ended up filling about a foot-deep hole with trash concrete we found at the edge of the RV park before the jack finally stopped sinking.  So we need to figure out a better solution to that...

Aaron decorated our RV for Christmas - I think he did a great job!

Ok this has nothing to do with Christmas
but while we were out at night this cute guy
was jumping on our car

Christmas lights!

We went to visit the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse during this stay.  It was a neat complex, with all the buildings well preserved/restored for both the lighthouse and the surrounding keepers' houses.  It is Florida's tallest lighthouse and still operates, though now it is in civilian hands.

At the entrance to the complex

Atop the lighthouse

While we were staying at Rose Bay, Aaron took advantage of living in Florida to book a VERY last minute cruise (two days' notice!!) on the Celebrity Silhouette - I'll make a separate post about that.  As we left on the cruise I attempted to book our next Thousand Trails stay...and hence the title.  For 3 stays now I've tried to book a Thousand Trails campground in the Daytona area with no success, and I've had increasing difficulty finding ANYTHING.  The first time, over Christmas, I didn't think much of it - it was a holiday, after all, and I was able to find a full two weeks in the Orlando area.  The second time also included a holiday weekend (MLK Jr day), so I thought maybe that was a problem, and I couldn't find anything in Orlando and had to call to have someone help me find a place outside Orlando for only 12 days (couldn't get 14).  This last attempt didn't include any holidays and I couldn't find any availability anywhere in the 10ish parks in the greater Orlando/Daytona area.  After several days of trying I found 7 days at the same outside Orlando park - I think someone must have cancelled a reservation.  This time the Thousand Trails phone line was so busy they weren't even allowing you to stay on hold for help.  So...things are looking very bad.  The true intense snowbird season is starting in January and with the hurricane closing a lot of parks on the west coast it seems that we're going to have a lot of trouble the rest of the season.  I'm a bit stressed!  We'll see what happens next time I need to book something...

We didn't take any pictures, but during the hurricane we experienced something odd with our RV where the engine lost power in surges and white smoke came out of the tailpipe.  Aaron read the code off our code reader that we purchased back in Texas and the first (and simplest/cheapest) solution was to replace the fuel filter, which he did during our stay.  Fingers crossed that this fixes the problem!

The last weekend we were parked at Rose Bay we headed up to Charlotte for our friends' Christmas party.  They hold this pretty much every year and it's always a good time!

Playing Catan at our friends' house the night before the party - 
for almost the first time ever, I won!

With my Bank of America friends at the Christmas party

Campground Crowding! And a look at Orange County Parks

We just finished up a short (5 day) stay at Moss Park, an Orange County park where we've stayed many times, so I figured rather than extoll the many virtues of the park again, I'd talk some more about what got us here and Orange County parks in general.

But first, the obligatory campsite pic!  We returned to site 54, the first site we ever had here, with its nice seclusion at the end of the park loop.

Moss Park campsite

While we were at Moss Park, we visited Animal Kingdom and Epcot, and had beautiful days at both.  We were at Epcot for the first day of the Festival of the Arts and witnessed (but did not participate in!) the unreal 7 hour lines for the Figment Popcorn Bucket!

The Lion King 50th anniversary statues

Up close and personal with a giraffe on
Kilimanjaro Safaris!

We caught the Jungle Book version of the new KiteTails show

Mickey and Minnie on the river!

Painting Epcot's version of Starry Night

Full view of the paint-by-number mural (background) with the 
expectation of the finished product on the bookmark (foreground)

So, back to the promised content.  You may or may not have noticed we're off our typical 2-week Thousand Trails 1-week County Park camping schedule for the Orlando winter.  This is because 2 months ago, when I attempted to make a Thousand Trails reservation for the second week of January, NONE of the Thousand Trails parks in the Orlando area were available.  NONE.  We've had weeks in previous years where we had to settle for our least favorite of the Thousand Trails in the area, but we've never before experienced a time when we couldn't book ANYTHING.  We *think* this was because the Disney marathon weekend occurred over the time frame we were trying to book.  So, due to this, we ended up booking two weeks at Kelly Park.  But then...we thought we'd be able to get into Thousand Trails for the third week of January but NO, again, EVERYTHING was booked.  This time it seemed to be due to the Martin Luther King Jr holiday.  So, maxed out at Kelly Park (we can only stay 2 weeks at a given county park), we had to move to another park.  I tried to move just down the street to Trimble Park, but NO again, there was nothing available!  This is particularly unreal - I've never had trouble booking a county park at the start of the booking window.  So we ended up at Moss Park, even though it's the farthest away from Kelly Park, because (I assume) it has a lot more campsites available.  Of course Moss Park is lovely and we enjoyed our stay, but this experience was a bit unnerving for both of us.

Campground crowding has been a hot topic in the RV podcasts, YouTube videos, etc. that we follow.  Aaron has been quite concerned about what this means for our future for some time, but I adopted a more optimistic attitude...  However this experience has got us both thinking.  Our little 2-week/1-week schedule has worked really well for us the past two years, and with it challenged so strongly these past few weeks, we're thinking the lifestyle we hoped for - with a bit of spontaneity! - might not be possible for a while.  Now, we're probably inappropriately extrapolating our 2 week experience in one location to year-round across the country, but as linked above we're not the only ones experiencing issues.  I saw a headline flash by a few weeks ago that said you needed to book things now 6 months in advance, which is just much more advance planning than we usually have!  So we will see how the rest of the season goes (we typically book 45/60 days in advance, so far so good on the next 45/60 days), but if we regularly find these kinds of issues, we may be dissuaded from this lifestyle.  Having a 40-ft behemoth of an RV without a place to park overnight is quite a worry for me!!

The other thing I thought I'd mention is much less dramatic - looking at an interesting trend in the Orange County Parks.  Now that we've stayed in Kelly Park, and with my memory refreshed on Moss Park, I noticed a couple things.  I feel that you can group the Orange County Parks into two categories - Moss Park and Kelly Park have an entrance gate with an entry fee for general park use and do not allow pets.  Trimble Park and Magnolia Park are free for day use and do allow pets.  Moss Park and Kelly Park have more, larger, more private sites with nicer bathhouses (with actual shower stalls with doors, for example).  Trimble Park and Magnolia Park have fewer campsites with less privacy and cheaper bathhouses (they're still nicer than many we've seen, but opt for shower curtains instead of doors and don't have as nice a changing area).  There's an obvious correlation here if the parks have more money because they collect day use entry fees, so they have more money to spend on nicer accommodations, but it is interesting that there's not a difference in the actual cost to camp.  I'm struggling to understand the difference in the pet policy.  One thought I had is that it's hard to enforce a pet policy if you don't actually talk to each car on the way in at the entry gate.  I suppose they might also want to avoid the pet waste issue in their 'nicer' parks.  Not sure on this one but it's an interesting correlation!

Hope you enjoy my random musings!  :-)

First time at Tropical Palms RV Resort

Tropical Palms RV Resort is the most convenient Thousand Trails park to Disney World, and unsurprisingly we could never find a spot here last time we were in Orlando.  This time around we got in!  I'm not sure whether it's because we're looking pre-Winter (not as busy?) or because the Canadians have been largely unable to come to the US (though that seems to be changing), but we made it!  This is my favorite Orlando-area Thousand Trails park so far!  It is clean and well-kept with concrete pads for the RVs and several trees scattered throughout, plus the laundromat is HUGE and clean with new machines.

Our campsite at Tropical Palms

A rainbow over the campground

On our way to the campground we stopped by Tire Pro Mobile RV & Commercial Truck Tire Repair to get our front tires replaced.  We really liked the mechanic who owns this business - he was knowledgeable and friendly with reasonable prices, and he seemed quite honest.  He told us we were probably ok for many more months, but together we decided that since Aaron and I are planning a big trip to Texas later in the winter, we should go ahead and get the tires replaced.  Aaron really enjoyed watching him work and asking lots of questions.

Tire's off!

The mechanic had a seriously 
impressive set of tools in his truck!

We only had a 12 minute drive to Hollywood Studios, where we enjoyed some holiday fun.

A 'chestnut pinecone' dessert

Santa!

We also took a quick trip to Epcot and Magic Kingdom.

Christmas lights are starting to go up at Epcot

Christmas cavalcade at Magic Kingdom

We rode Splash Mountain once more to make sure we saw it
at least one last time before they change the theming to 
the Princess and the Frog

Back at Animal Kingdom, we caught a Christmas cavalcade on the water with a festive Chip & Dale!

Christmas float!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas in Orlando!

Heading South & Thoughts on Thousand Trails

We had a couple of short stops this week as we continued our trek to Florida.  First was The Oaks at Point South (Thousand Trails), and second was Kathryn Abbey Hanna City Park.

The Oaks was a nice RV park in South Carolina.  Overall clean, all pull-through sites, and relatively spacious sites (for an RV 'parking lot').  Like the last Thousand Trails park we visited in Williamsburg, the campground was quite wooded, giving more of an illusion of privacy than you actually had.  We had some neat neighbors from Canada also trekking to Florida.  This RV park also had the relatively unique feature of a walking trail around a neighboring lake.

It was interesting to contrast this to our previous private and beautiful spot at Cheraw State Park.  We've watched a lot of RV YouTube videos and it's fairly common for people to share their thoughts on staying in RV parks like the Thousand Trails collection vs. boondocking or staying in state/national parks.  I feel like most people express a strong preference for the state/national parks, though we've personally met a lot of happy Thousand Trails campers.  I'm thinking there are some pretty strong pluses to both...pros for Thousand Trails: (1) it's 'free' on a per night basis (you pay an annual membership); (2) they are almost always very close to an interstate, so there is minimal motor home driving on narrow winding country roads or crowded city streets; (3) you almost always get full hookups (50A power, water, sewer); (4) you almost always have a reasonably priced on-site laundromat; (5) the sites are typically level.  Pros for national/state parks: (1) they tend to be BEAUTIFUL; (2) the sites tend to be private; (3) they usually have a lot of hiking trails and/or other natural outdoor activities; (4) they usually have fire rings and frequently grills on each site.  The pros for each, negated, become the cons for the other category.  So I think I like both.  The state parks are refreshing for the soul, but the RV parks involve less stressful travel days and make it a lot easier to get chores done.

The Oaks at South Point was kind of in the middle of nowhere, but the weather was pretty decent so we went walking a lot and set out to explore.  We stopped by the visitor center, where they directed us to some impressive ruins of Old Sheldon Church, and where we learned about a nearby Spanish settlement (Santa Elena) that pre-dated Jamestown.  We attempted to learn more about the settlement first hand, but the site itself was on a marine base and thus inaccessible to us, and a museum in downtown Beaufort was inexplicably closed in the middle of the day.  Still, it was neat to learn that the site even existed.

After The Oaks, we FINALLY made it to Florida and stayed at Jacksonville's Kathryn Abbey Hanna Park.  This park was beautiful; the campground was sandwiched between a lake and the beach, both on park property and within walking distance.  Unfortunately a cold front had just moved in and it was too cold to do much more than take a quick picture at the ocean.  We learned here that although the peak season for southern Florida is in the winter, the peak season for northern Florida is in the summer just like the rest of the country.  The campground was not even half full, which made it wonderfully quiet and peaceful.  The roads to get to the campsites though were narrow, windy, and a bit scary in a 40ft long, 9ft wide motor home!

At our next stop we should finally be far enough south in Florida to escape the cold!