Saturday January 15th 2022

Today was a beautiful sunny day with a high temperature just above seventy. The good thing is yesterday’s wind was gone. Another cold front is due to pass through the area late tonight into tomorrow morning. It sounds like we will get a lot of rain and wind with this front.

I did a lot of exploring around the Fort Wilderness campground today. My fist visit to the campground was in the late eighties and I’ve been here a number of times since. The biggest change since my last visit in the spring of 2019 is all of the land clearing in the old River Country Water Park area behind Pioneer Hall and Crockett’s Tavern. They were just getting started with the construction of the new hotel on my last visit. The work stopped in March of 2020 at the onset of the pandemic. No schedule for restarting the work has been announced. I suspect the whole project will be re-imagined over the next couple of years before work gets underway again.

One of the parts of the construction that has been completed is the new Tri-Circle D ranch barn. The new barn is a large modern steel structure across the service road from the old barn’s location. About a third of the barn is open for visitors. You can checkout the horses in their stalls and take a pony ride if your of the right age. When I visited this afternoon it was bath time for a Clydesdale and a pony. The contrast in size is remarkable.

On my exploration today I walked around a number of the camping loops. A few sites still had elaborate Christmas decorations on display. Some were in the process of being taken down. Considering it has been three weeks since the holiday, the site residents must have been here a long time. Campers at this campground seem to be big on decorating. Most of the year it is very Disney oriented. At Halloween and Christmas the decorations are seasonal with a Disney flair.

I concluded my day back at the beach on Bay Lake to watch the fireworks from the Magic Kingdom. Tonight I found a beach chair way down at the end of the new area of the beach with no one around. I was able to here the music and see all of the aerial shells clearly. Between the better location and the fact that I was warmly dressed tonight, I enjoyed the show more tonight.