Europe: Part I - Disney Magic

We're back!  We had a little misadventure in the middle of our big trip, but I'll cover that in Part II.  We took over 3000 photos so I figured I should break this up a bit, and the most logical break seemed to be the three cruise ships, so in this post I'll cover our time on the first cruise - the transatlantic crossing on the Disney Magic.

Disney Magic!

We left from Miami and had to wait a LOOOOONG time outside in line before we could get in the cruise terminal.  We heard from some other passengers that Disney recently changed the type of COVID testing and somehow this created longer than usual lines...maybe?  Regardless, we were outside for about an hour before we finally entered the terminal and took and passed our COVID tests (hooray!).

The first task was to decorate our stateroom door!  Aaron worked hard on some custom magnets for all segments of this big European vacation - he created the lower two magnets on the door.  Normally we fill our Disney doors with magnets from all of our Disney cruises, but since we were going on 2 non-Disney ships and had to haul our luggage around all sorts of places, we limited the door to a couple of generic magnets and the current and most recent (Panama) Disney cruises.

Our door!  Aaron made the lower two
magnets

We were delighted to discover that COVID restrictions continue to ease on the ship, so in addition to not having to wear a mask, you can actually get about 3 feet away from the characters for photos.  Previously you were more like 10-15 feet away behind a rope.  We took TONS of character photos, here are some of the highlights!

Captain Mickey!

Captain Minnie!

Chip & Dale!  These are my favorite characters to take a photo with.

Dining on the ship was delicious and fun as always!  We didn't manage to keep any of the serving team for the whole cruise...the head of dining staff was sick for the first couple of days, our main waiter came down with COVID about halfway through, and our assistant waiter had a family emergency a few days after that.  We did get about a week of golden time with our proper team, and they were AWESOME.  Our assistant waiter, Joe, made us origami almost every night.

We sat outside the buffet at the back of the ship for many
breakfasts and lunches - amazing views!

Dining in Animator's Palate

Joe creating a fighter jet!

Aris and Joe one morning in the buffet - 
this morning Joe had made me a beautiful
flower from a paper towel!!  He had it waiting
when we randomly wandered into the buffet 
that morning.

The last night of the cruise was our anniversary - 
if you zoom in you can see they brought
us a special dessert with a 'Happy
Anniversary' chocolate :-).

Also as expected the entertainment onboard was incredible.  Every sea day we heard from Bruce Kimbrell for an insider's view of a different aspect of the Disney company (and Disney World, Disneyland, etc.).  Every sea day we attended "Anyone Can Cook" - a cooking class conducted (on this cruise) by the head of food and drink for the Epcot festivals.  There were three main Broadway-style shows, including two of my favorites - Tangled and Twice Charmed.  The adult activities director was amazing - she was so lively and entertaining that we went to her game shows nearly every night even though they started well after my preferred bedtime.  One of my favorite evening shows was with Siegfried Tieber - a very entertaining magician who has been on Penn & Teller: Fool Us twice!  Siegfried invited me on stage to help with one of his tricks with a Rubik's Cube.  He held another small magic show and then a Q&A when he actually showed us how to do a basic card trick.  We loved this guy!

On stage with Siegfried!  I'm 'solving' the Rubik's Cube behind my back

We ended up having to skip our first expected stop at the Azores due to a storm.  The captain did not feel he could safely dock with the predicted waves, and was further concerned that sailing through the storm would be very uncomfortable for everyone on board.  To his credit, he came to talk to us in person before the evening show the day they announced the cancellation.  He had prepared a nice set of slides to illustrate the problem and his solution (skipping the Azores and gunning it to get to Lisbon ahead of the storm).  We understood and appreciated the reasoning, but it was still a bummer to miss the Azores, as we had never been and were looking forward to it.  On the bright side, this added one more day at sea, and the days at sea are really remarkable on a Disney ship, so that was good.  In fact, when we finally arrived in Lisbon, the cruise director asked if we were excited to be done with our 8 days at sea...and the majority of the crowd cheered much louder when he suggested we could just keep on cruising and add a 9th day at sea!

Our captain and his explanation of our escape from the storm

Finally: our stops!  On the evening of our 8th day at sea we finally found land in Lisbon, Portugal.  In a rare event for Disney, we docked in the evening and were allowed off the ship at dinner time.  The dining rotation on Disney is such an integral part of the cruise experience that they normally make sure they are sailing at dinner time, but they made an exception this time I think as a slight compensation for missing the Azores.  We went ahead and got off the ship and walked to a nearby square to observe the sculptures and get a drink with free wifi - Aaron tried a local drink called ginja that tasted like a cherry port.  The view of the Lisbon skyline from the ship was beautiful, and we enjoyed an incredible moon rise over the city that I just couldn't capture in a photo despite my best efforts.

Nighttime at Lisbon

A view of the city from Castelo de Sao Jorge

After Lisbon we enjoyed three stops in Spain - Cadiz, Malaga, and Cartagena.  We enjoyed each of these, though none had quite the old world charm of Lisbon.

In Cadiz we witnessed the low tide that beached many boats - 
in the foreground you can see a couple of men taking the 
opportunity to get some work done on their boat!

A small RV park in Cadiz!  We took a lot of pictures of this because
we had never seen an RV park in Europe before...we came to find out 
as we continued to travel that small RVs are actually VERY 
common in the touristy areas of Europe, but at the time of this
photo it was still a novelty to us.

Outside Castillo de San Sebastian, which we 
couldn't tour as it is still active, but we enjoyed
the half mile walk to it across Paseo Fernando Quinones

At the Roman Theatre in Malaga.  The Alcazaba,
an incredible mostly restored walled city, is 
visible on the hill in the background.

The Roman Theatre in Cartagena (we saw a LOT of Roman 
Theatres on this trip...this was the best restored).  I'm sitting in
the women's section of the theatre.

While touring the museum at a mostly closed castle in Cartagena, 
Aaron found a postcard with a submarine on it.  We spent the 
rest of our time hunting down the submarine...we found a whole
shipyard actively working on submarines as well as this small
Naval Museum annex featuring the first fully electric submarine.

At the end of nearly two blissful weeks on the Disney Magic, we finally arrived at our debarkation port in Barcelona.  Sad times!!  Then the real adventure began...but that's a story for the next post.

Goodbye Disney Magic!

Not Kentucky...

Well, I know I promised an exciting Kentucky trip last time...but the weather worked against me :-(.  We were at the farm getting ready to leave in the RV, and Aaron was getting blown all over the place packing up the outside of the RV.  He looked up the weather and we had 10mph winds at the farm and 30mph winds predicted at our first destination.  Then he looked at our final destination in Indiana, outside Louisville, and they were calling for rain for the weekend we were to spend there camping with our friends.  So he decided that it wasn't worth the risk of driving the RV in those winds (we were liable to get blown off the road) just to spend the weekend hunched miserably inside the RV to avoid the rain.  Instead we decided to drive the car all the way to St. Louis to see our friends at their house.

We did have a great time visiting with them in St. Louis, attending a St. Jude fundraising "Rock and Roll" Bingo, going on some walks, and playing lots of games.

Rock and Roll Bingo, which involved many delicious snacks
Mary prepared

Waiting for our table at Taco Buddha...they are happy to serve
you margaritas on the sidewalk while you wait (Mary & Mark
and Mary's daughter Lisa, plus Teddy the dog and Aaron)

Enjoying a smokeless firepit in the backyard patio-in-process

Playing Splendor

As an added bonus, our found time (we left Friday instead of Wednesday) gave us some time to work on several projects on the RV!  Aaron removed a damaged jack pad (still to determine: how to replace/fix/deal with it), applied new caulk/sealant to various seams on the RV, and worked on my washer/dryer.  After testing all the electrical connections, we finally dug deep enough into the machine to see that the condensing unit was completely clogged with lint - surely the problem!  Unfortunately, unlike normal dryers, there is not a lint filter to clean on this unit, and the only way to remove this lint is to completely dissect the machine the way we did, so I'm not sure how we're supposed to prevent this from happening again in the future.  Hopefully it is fixed for now, though because I kept on running outside to help Aaron with other projects, I didn't actually get to observe the full cycle and didn't retrieve the clothes at the end of it so I'm not 100% sure whether it finished the dry cycle without error...

Somehow this happened to our heavy duty rubber
jack pad at the last Thousand Trails we camped at 
in Daytona Beach

The jack pad removed

Working on the washing machine

As I write this we are sitting in Miami preparing to leave on our big European cruise trip.  If all goes well (that is, we pass 3 COVID tests over the next few weeks), we'll spend 7 weeks cruising to and around Europe!  This is to kind of make up for the massive European cruise trip Aaron planned for spring 2020, and uses up a bunch of the future cruise credits we accumulated then when all our plans were canceled.  Tomorrow we start the whole process on a two week transatlantic crossing on the Disney Magic.  So, if we pass our COVID tests tomorrow and get to actually get on the ship, I won't be able to update the blog for about 2 months.  I'll post again in early July after we return.  

Magnolia Springs State Park

We spent a woefully short time at Magnolia Springs State Park in Georgia.  This was a lovely park with so many things to see and do!  We had a nice campsite that backed up on the woods.  It was a little strange that with all of this room they stuck the concrete picnic table and fire ring behind the RV instead of next to it.  Not all sites were like this, and since we weren't planning on cooking out in our short visit it wasn't a problem, just a little odd.

Our campsite at Magnolia Springs State Park

This park seemed to have a little bit of everything.  Of course it had the eponymous spring, which was lovely and full of yellow bellied slider turtles!

Magnolia Spring; it was interesting that (I think) because it fed a 
pre-existing stream, the surrounding area was not nearly so 
clean looking as the springs we saw recently in Florida - only the
spring itself was the beautiful blue color

So many yellow bellied sliders!!  We counted 26 coming at us - clearly
people feed them from the bridge regularly, as they came 
swarming to us (really moving fast!) as soon as we stopped on the bridge

An alligator just off another bridge :-)

In association with the lake and spring they had a trail along the lake and boat rentals.  There were lots of nice looking cottages, a few of which looked like they had a view of the lake.  

The other really interesting thing about this park is that it is the site of the short-lived Camp Lawton, a prisoner of war camp for captured Union soldiers in the Civil War.  They had a short history trail with signs and a couple of ruins, plus an informative museum about not only this camp but others like it.  I don't remember learning much about the conditions in Civil War prisoner of war camps, but they were pretty brutal!  The pictures of the men leaving the camps at the end of the war reminded me of the prisoners in the concentration camps in Germany.  I guess the thing that makes the Civil War camps slightly better is that they didn't just kill thousands of civilians upon their arrival at the camp - in fact, until President Lincoln put a stop to it, there was a regular prisoner exchange between Union and Confederacy that kept the prison populations low and transient - but still, the circumstances were pretty awful.  It was interesting to learn more about this depressing part of our history.  This camp was designed to alleviate crowding at Andersonville/Camp Sumter, and reports from the prisoners indicated that the circumstances were indeed a little better at Camp Lawton, but it only lasted 3 months as just after it was completed Sherman started marching toward the area, and the confederates were worried he would come and liberate the camp.

One of the three redoubts guarding the camp - the only one
still really visible

One final thing about the park I just have to include is the gopher tortoise just outside the nature center.  We didn't make it to the nature center while it was open, but it was cool that they had the tortoise outside, and it makes me think this nature center might have been nicer than most.

Gopher tortoise!  The state reptile of Georgia

I won't make a separate post because we only stayed one night, but we spent our last night on the road before heading to the farm at Ebenezer Park, a county park in Rock Hill, South Carolina.  We were able to catch up with my friend Roddie (my old boss at Bank of America) while we were there, as he lived not far from the park.  He took us to an awesome restaurant in downtown Rock Hill called Kounter, which had lots of delicious and unique food. 

Our campsite at Ebenezer Park.  It was a bit narrow and not
very level and also suffered from having the fire ring and
picnic table behind the RV instead of next to it (again!), but it offered a
bit of privacy and sewer!

I won't bore you with all the amazing food photos we took, but
here was their version of beef sliders - basically half a pan of
Hawaiian rolls sliced in half and filled with a huge beef patty 
and pulled pork - mmm!!

Dining with Roddie

A fun double-bench swing overlooking Lake Wylie at Ebenezer Park

Next stop: the family farm!  Unfortunately the weather looks a little miserable for our first week there, so we won't get much work on the RV done right away.  In a couple weeks we'll be taking a trip with friends to the Louisville area, stay tuned for that!

Crossing the Florida Georgia Line

Our first couple stops on the trip north were short, quiet, and uneventful, so I figured I'd combine them in one post.  We had one last stop in Florida at Cary State Forest - a favorite of ours!  This time we stayed at the one 'inside' site on the loop (there's a driving loop, all but one of the campsites are on the outside of the loop).  We had eyed this one critically in the past, thinking it had much less privacy, but it was the only one available by the time I went to book something.  While we were in the campsite we could still barely see the other campers, so our privacy concerns were kind of silly (and we should have known, when every site has an acre or so of space around it...).

Our 'less private' campsite - ha!

Looking at the photo above, do you notice anything odd?  I'll wait....  

Did you find it?  So, normally when I post these pictures, you see the front of the RV.  This is because almost every campsite is set up as a 'back-in' site (well, unless it's pull-through, but we don't get many of those because they're usually more expensive).  This one was set up as a drive-in site!  We didn't even notice until we had backed in, but after parking Aaron immediately noticed that the utilities were on the wrong side!  Also the front steps led off into the underbrush.  So we had to drive out and do a three point turn to get ourselves in the site the right way.  

Unfortunately while we were here the bugs were HORRIBLE.  There are always some bugs here, but for whatever reason (we're blaming excessive rain recently) the biting midges were swarming EVERYWHERE while we were here.  Normally we enjoy strolling along the long walking trails here, but this time the bugs made being outside miserable, and the aforementioned rain left most trails waterlogged anyway.  This was quite disappointing, but it was still nice to just sit inside the RV and look out the windows at the scenery.

The view from the window on 'my' side of the living room

This is our bug catcher (a strip of wide sticky tape) - the bugs 
here are what flew in the RV while we had the door open for a 
few minutes in the morning.  Ick! 

Our next stop was much more pleasant bug-wise - our first visit to Laura S. Walker State Park in Georgia.  This was a short just-over-an-hour drive from Cary State Forest along Aaron's favorite kind of road - two lanes each direction with a median through a flat remote area with little traffic.  This park was cute with two hiking trails and a lake.  The campground did NOT offer much privacy though - this time our site on the inside of the loop had NO privacy.  If we had booked early enough to get a waterfront site or an outside loop site we would have had a nicer experience, but again, this was what was available by the time we decided when we were camping here.  Still, the campground and park were well-maintained with free wifi, good restrooms, and one of the best-draining dump stations I've ever seen.  The comfort station even had a washer and dryer - $1 to wash and only $0.75 to dry!!  The cheapest I've ever seen!  I almost did laundry on principle, but since we'll be at my parents' house with unlimited free laundry by the end of the week I resisted the urge.  The lake was lovely with a nice gazebo nearby.   The park was very dog friendly, with dog poop stations (bags & trash cans) and small and large dog parks!  

Our campsite at Laura S. Walker State Park - what you can't 
quite see is that the white truck is parked in front of a trailer
whose campfire area stares directly at our campfire area

This dock was in the main park area

Crossing the bridge on the lake trail

One interesting tidbit of history here - on our hike we saw lots of trees with large strips of bark removed.  Apparently they did a lot of gum harvesting in this area to produce rosin, and this strange scar is what the tree looks like years later.

A gum harvesting scar - the sign
nearby claims these are called 'catfaces' 
because you can make out whiskers and
also ears at the top of the scar

Next up: more of Georgia!

Family time and Cruising

As I mentioned earlier, we have left the Orlando area!  Our first stop on our trek north was a two week stint at Sunshine Holiday Daytona, a Thousand Trails resort where we stayed in the fall to be close to my sister while we helped with the kids.  As with the last time we were here, we parked in the rear of the park with all the full-time residents.  I have mixed feelings on this resort, as the parking situation is not great - again it was difficult to navigate around the permanent residents' lawns that held vehicles, lawn decorations, and outright anti-RV posts to the edge of the lots.  However, the staff here are quite friendly and accommodating, they have the cheapest laundry I've seen since we started RVing, and *most* of the residents are very friendly.  I say *most*...for the first time basically ever since we started all this, we encountered a hostile neighbor.  We're thinking he was grumpy because he was going through a divorce - when we arrived, there were two kayaks and two bikes at the site, but by the time we left there was only one of each, and in the couple days we were there before we moved we only saw one man.  We promptly asked the office to be moved and they were able to accommodate us a day later, relocating us between two friendly new neighbors.  Somehow in all of this we didn't manage to take a picture of either site, so instead of our typical campsite photo here I'll show you a picture of poor Beamer, who we still had for the first day we were there, wondering why his house shrunk and why it was moving!!

Stressed out pup!

We chose this campground due to its proximity to my sister, and we went over to her place both weekends.  We enjoyed playing games, eating good food, and trading cruise stories.

Playing Carcassonne

Playing the card version of Pictionary - a rare event when my
brother-in-law and our eldest nephew actually joined the game!

As anyone who knows Aaron would guess, he constantly has his eye on cruises and discounts on cruises.  As luck would have it, Carnival cruise line was running a spring/50th anniversary sale when we arrived at Daytona.  Aaron found a great deal on a cruise that ran during the week, leaving us our weekends free to spend time with my sister.  It was going to two islands we hadn't visited before on a ship we hadn't been on - perfect!  So with a few days' notice we booked the cruise and headed down to Port Canaveral to board the Carnival Elation.  We cruised in our first-ever inside cabin...I have mixed feelings, on the one hand it was a LOT cheaper and had basically the same space as the outside cabins on the ship, but on the other hand not having any natural light actually made it harder for me to sleep, and the lack of natural ventilation made it a little musty (though that might have been the age of the ship - 20+ years old).  The ship, being old, was much smaller than they build cruise ships nowadays, had basically no specialty dining, and had quite small entertainment lounges.  We had trouble finding seats at the evening theater productions and at the comedy shows.  On the flip side, the entertainers were very talented, and the ship had more character than the more modern ones did, with artistic architectural and decorative touches everywhere.  The one hiccup in this cruise was that someone had a medical emergency on route to our first port (which should have been Grand Turk) - right at the beginning of a sea day - so we had to divert to Nassau, which became our first port instead (we skipped Grand Turk and headed to the Dominican Republic on schedule).  As far as we know the person recovered well after getting to Nassau.  Here are the highlights of the cruise!

A dolphin swam around the port area before we departed!

Our daily breakfast spot at the buffet restaurant

One of the best things you can expect on a Carnival cruise
is a towel animal zoo!

A first for us - this ship offered tea time
on sea days, which consisted of tea,
sandwiches, and light desserts - yum!

A nighttime view of "Tiffany's" buffet - I loved all the stained
glass peacocks!  Hopefully you can kind of see what I mean
about the artistry of the ship

An outside view of the ship from the port at Amber Cove

The view atop Loma Isabel de Torres - amazing!

The Christ the Redeemer statue atop 
Loma Isabel de Torres

A heart shaped photo opportunity in the park
surrounding the peak

A young man was driving these cattle in the middle of the road!

We had a few days after we returned to visit my sister again and do laundry before beginning our trek north through public parks (read: no sewer in my future!).  We also discovered we were down to just 18% left on our propane tanks - a problem since I use propane for cooking all the time!  Unlike the last time we rushed to fill the tank when we misread the gauge, this time we were legitimately low on gas, so we needed to fill up.  Finding a place to fill the tank permanently attached to our RV has always been a challenge, but much to my delight I discovered this time that truck stops can sometimes provide propane!  A Flying J on our route on 95 offered reasonably priced propane, so we didn't even have to divert from our travel plans.

Aaron likes to see what's going on and 
ask the guys about what they're doing
when we get the tank filled

With that we were headed to our last stop in Florida on the way north.