Friday November 10th 2023

There was an increase in humidity and a decrease in wind today. The result was a much cloudier but hotter day. The temperature peaked in the upper eighties, but it still managed to stay dry. This area has now been added to the moderate drought area in the state. The water level in the retention ponds in the park reflects that fact.

Today was the day to replenish a lot of things I was running low on. First on that list was gas in the tank to be able to run all my errands. I got caught at the top of the roller coaster of gas prices today. Ever since I arrived in this area it seems like the price of gas goes up and down in swings of about thirty cents or more. Earlier in the week the price of gas was at $2.85 a gallon. Today it was anywhere from $3.05 to $3.20 a gallon. I filled up at one of the higher priced stations paying $3.16 a gallon. It was necessary. I don’t know were the bottom of my gas gauge is on my new car. I probably had 2.5 gallons still in the tank, but who knew.

Traffic was also a real challenge. I was out during the middle part of the afternoon when school is usually getting out, but the schools in this area had the day off. Even so, traffic was extreme. It took several cycles to get through ever traffic light I encountered. These areas in the middle of the afternoon haven’t been this busy. It must be the Veterans Day holiday making this into a three day weekend for many people.

The Walmart in Haines City was also busy. The fact that the kids were out of school was also evident. There were lots of little kids hanging onto the sides of carriages while others were running away from harried parents. I managed to get what I needed, get through the checkouts and return to the long lines of traffic to return home. Even taking a different, more through the neighborhood, route home I found the long lines again before I got home.

They are building a lot of new housing developments and lots of apartments being built in the area. There are a few road developments going on to support the added residents. One of the bigger problems is on Interstate 4. They are working on widening the road, but the few miles up to the resort area and into Orlando are still a big bottleneck. Traffic stays off the interstate to avoid the construction as a result the local roads backup.

Thursday November 9th 2023

I went to see the decorations at Disney World’s Magic Kingdom today. They changed from Halloween to Christmas during the nights of November 1st and 2nd. I waited a week to make sure they were all ready before visiting again. The first Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas party separate admission special event is tonight, so they better be ready. The party also makes it a good day for low crowds since the park closes early for the party.

It was a few minutes after noon when I arrived at the park. People were starting to line up on Main Street for the first parade of the day. I wandered around town square and looked at the Christmas decor while I waited for the parade. All of the creative scarecrows for Halloween have been replaced by toy soldiers and a huge Christmas tree in the center of the square. Main Street going up toward Cinderella’s castle was lined with Christmas Wreathes, festive garland and ornamental lamps. The whole area is very well decorated.

I remained on Main Street for the Festival of Fantasy Parade. This parade has been around for a number of years and showcases the Disney Princesses, Characters and music. It is a fun parade. The town square area of Main Street is the end of the parade that starts in Frontier Land. You have to wait a minute or two after the parade to navigate up Main Street into the rest of the park.

The rest of my day at the park was filled with a lot of waking around, a couple of rides and a show or two. One ride I had never ridden until today is the Tomorrow Land Speedway. It just isn’t something that an adult that drives a car every day needs to wait in line to do. Today it was only a ten minute wait, so I gave it a try. It was a struggle. I think the car I had was plague with a bent steering mechanism. It really didn’t want to go in the direction I turned the steering wheel. I don’t think I’ll be riding the Speedway again.

I did enjoy the Country Bears show for the umpteenth time. Those talking hillbilly bears can sing a mean song. Even the raccoon that lives in the top hat can carry a tune. I used to enjoy the Christmas version as well, but they don’t do that anymore. It will be interesting to see what the announced update to the show brings.

As I expected for most of the afternoon the crowds were manageable. At four o’clock the people with tickets for the party can enter the park. The crowds start to pick up. Regular day guests, such as myself, have to be out of the park by 6PM. I started to make my way home at 4PM. Rush hour traffic caused me to take a longer route that had less stop and go traffic. It took about three times as long to get home.

Wednesday November 8th 2023

It was another nice Florida fall day with the high temperature reaching the low to mid eighties. Once again the day began with the overnight temperature in the very comfortable sixties. There was only a scattered covering of clouds throughout the day.

All day yesterday I was waiting for a notice that a couple of packages from Amazon had been delivered to one of the nearby lockers. That notice finally came in about 8PM last night. My first task after breakfast this morning was to go pickup my packages from the locker. Other than dealing with the expected traffic that was an easy task.

One of the purchases I was waiting for was a USB Wifi device for my laptop computer. The built in Wifi on my primary picture editing and blog writing machine stopped working last week. I bought the thirty dollar replacement part to get back on the air. While it was broken, I had the added task of moving the files via SD card to my Chrome book computer to upload and publish the blog every night. The added step, while not difficult, added another ten to fifteen minutes to the task.

Once I got home with the new Wifi device, I plugged it in and turned on the computer. Nothing changed. The new device was recognized, but it was not operational. I started to dig into the issue in more depth. My intuition was telling me that it probably wasn’t a hardware problem, but rather a software problem. Digging into various menus, dialogs and using a few command line tricks I remembered from way back, I found a software switch that wasn’t thrown. Once I toggled the switch the original interface started to work and the new one complained that it wasn’t unique. How everything got fowled up in the first place is a mystery, but I had Wifi again. I’ll put the device away as a backup and keep plugging along with the nine year old computer’s original part.

It was very satisfying and kind of fun getting the laptop back up and running, but my computer tasks weren’t done. During the time my laptop was off the internet a backlog of updates accumulated. There were so many that I decided to make sure my data backups were all up to date before allowing the accumulated updates to be installed. The primary things that needs backup on my computer are all blog related. I keep two different backups of all of the pictures I take and the blog text. I don’t usually have enough internet bandwidth to make cloud backups of all my pictures, so only select pictures get cloud backup. External drives and USB sticks get all of the data.

All of the computer maintenance tasks took several hours. During the backup and updates there was a lot of time I could do other things, but I had to be available to watch for problems and kick off the next part of the process. My original plan for the day was to go to one of the Disney theme parks late in the afternoon into the evening, but I got lost in my computer maintenance task. There is always tomorrow and I get to use only one computer to create and post my blog tonight.

Tuesday November 7th 2023

Today’s weather was a repeat of Monday. The winds were low the humidity, while increasing, was still manageable and the overall temperature peaked in the mid eighties. Overall, it was a very nice day.

I can tell that I have adapted to standard time, since I didn’t wake up early this morning. In fact, I got a very slow start to the day. It was after ten by the time I finished my shower and started on breakfast. I continued on a very slow pace into the early afternoon drinking coffee and catching up on a few chores. When I finally got moving most of the daylight was over.

Walking around the RV resort today I saw signs of a transition from Halloween to Christmas. Most of the people who had decorated for Halloween had removed their decorations from their homes and golf carts. A few people have started to decorate for Christmas. Some candy cane lights and big wreathes are now heralding the season at a couple of sites. I imagine most of the Christmas decorations will arrive after Thanksgiving.

The usual compliment of birds were around the parks retention ponds. They have a lot more bank to forage for food along. The water level has gone down quiet a bit since I arrived here. There is about a six foot area of dried mud between the green grass and the water. That tracks with the fact that it has only rained for a few minutes total since I arrived. Last year at this time I was buttoned down here for hurricane Nicole. It dropped plenty of rain, but thankfully not much else.

Monday November 6th 2023

The temperature got down into the fifties overnight. It was nice that the sun rose into the sky earlier to start warming things up sooner. By mid afternoon the temperature peaked in the low to mid eighties. Each day this week is forecast to be a little bit warmer.

I got out of bed this morning as the inside temperature reached the high sixties. I felt much better today. The head cold I’ve been fighting the last few days is fading away. I can breath easily again. It is a good thing, because my facial tissue supply is waning.

This afternoon I headed out in search of food. I didn’t take anything out of the freezer yesterday, so my choices were limited and I was feeling lazy. My destination was Cooks of Dublin at Disney Springs for Fish and Chips. I also wanted to see what Christmas decorations were up. I’ve seen picture on the Internet of the decorations at the Magic Kingdom and Hollywood studios, but nothing yet from Disney Springs.

It turns out there was a good reason I hadn’t seen the decorations on the internet. They weren’t up yet. All of the Halloween decor has been taken down but the outside areas have not been decorated for the next set of holidays. The inside of the Disney stores are all decorated and all of the holiday themed merchandise is out. As night approached there was one possible sign of holiday decorations. All of the palm tree trunks sparkled with white lights. I don’t know if it is for the holidays or if it is an all the time thing. It looked good either way.

I got my Fish and Chips early in my visit to the Springs. The rest of my time was spent walking around, checking out a few stores and enjoying the day. Some of the places are so popular that you need to wait in line to shop. The Lego store and Gideon’s Bakehouse always seem to have lines. Would you wait an hour to buy an expensive cookie? Maybe fifteen minutes for a good cookie, but I have never tried any of their cookies.

As the day progressed I decided to delay my departure until after sunset. I didn’t think the combination of rush hour traffic, the glare of a setting sun and the newness of the two happening at the same time were a good driving combination. As a reward I got to hear some of the early performances of the evening entertainment.

Sunday November 5th 2023

The change back to standard time overnight cause the usual confusion this morning. The clock in the bedroom was still on daylight savings time, so that adds to the dilemma. Do I get up now or wait until it is really my usual time to get up? I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep, but I was only able to split the difference. So did my day begin a half an hour early or half an hour late?

I ended up taking the classic Sunday drive this afternoon. I set out without any real destination in mind. About 150 miles later I was back home after making a big loop to the south and east. There was a lot of other people out on the roads today. Some of them may have been traveling as aimlessly as me. At one point I decided to turn around and head back the way I came, but between traffic, the narrow road and absoultely nothing along the road but grass and a ditch made it difficult. The first opportunity to turn around was also my first opportunity to turn north. I was in the interestingly named town of Yeehaw Junction.

Don’t let anyone tell you that Florida is all development. Once you get away from the main routes and the established communities there is an awful lot of open land. Today I traveled trough miles of ranch land and some swampy land near the Kissimmee river. That is not to say there isn’t plenty of development. New housing is going up along the main roads going south and east from the Orlando area. Every year it is much further out from the current population centers. You can almost judge the state of competition by the distance from the cities.

The sun was starting to set as I neared home this afternoon. The early sunset is another part of the return to standard time that I will take a few days to get used to. I was greeted at my site by one of the resident pairs of Sandhill cranes. They reluctantly moved so I could park, but hung out just across the street and watched me get out of my car. I turned on my camera and took a few pictures of them for which they seemed to willingly pose.

Saturday November 4th 2023

It was another Florida Fall Day. The temperature for the day started in the low sixties and peaked in the high seventies with lots of wind out of the northeast and east. It was mostly cloudy, but unlike Friday it never rained.

This morning was a little more active than my normal leisurely breakfast pace. While I was waiting for the coffee to brew a big trailer arrived to occupy the site across the street. These are narrow park roads that don’t allow much room for maneuvering. I went out and volunteered to move my car to give him more room. He might of been able to back in without the extra space, but I sure got a lot of piece of mind out of the act. The guy was actually pretty good at backing up, even though he claimed it was the first time he ever had to back into a site.

I spent the day watching TV and snoozing off and on. My goal is to kick this head cold as soon as possible. The runny nose and congestion in my nose is a royal pain. I still managed to get in a good walk around the RV resort. The selection of birds was a little different today. One of the peacocks actually visited my site this afternoon. Earlier in the day I saw a more colorful duck than usual and a mystery bird that I’m still trying to figure out.

Friday November 3rd 2023

This week has been confusing to my routine. When I woke up this morning I was confused by the personalities on TV. Why were the weekday people on the air on Saturday. It took a couple of beats before I realized it was still Friday. Earlier in the week I thought Tuesday was Sunday. It has something to do with the day following a visit to Disney and a disruption to my sleep schedule. I also woke up congested this morning. It looks like I have a head cold.

Early in the day the weather seemed to be a repeat of yesterday, but in the early afternoon things changed a bit. Dark clouds moved in and a brief burst of rain disrupted the nice weather. It only lasted about five minutes. It rained hard enough to fill the puddles in the depressions in the grass and road. The rest of the day has been cloudy and dry.

I was just getting ready to leave my RV home when the rain started. It resulted in a delay that ultimately changed my entire afternoon. Not knowing how long the rain would last, I started to prepare some food for lunch. The delay was enough time for me to reconsider the rest of the day. I took a nap instead.

On my daily walk around the RV resort the sandhill cranes and ducks were in different locations. I know that someone in the park is feeding the ducks with feed corn, but it didn’t look like that was driving their location today. The clouds blocking the sun also kept the turtles from climbing the dead tree to warm up. Only one turtle was visible today.

Thursday November 2nd 2023

I was up before the sun this morning. Since this is one of the latest sunrises of the year, it wasn’t as impressive as it sounds. My reason for getting up early was a visit to Disney’s Animal Kingdom. It opened at 8AM, but more important, the animals are more active in the morning.

I planned to leave at 7:30, but didn’t actually leave until 7:50. Traffic was heavy, but not as bad as Monday morning. I was in line for the Kilimanjaro Safari ride just before 9AM. It turned into the longest safari ride I’ve ever taken. The animals seemed to want to stand in the road this morning. The safari trucks have to wait for the animals to move before proceeding. The ride is normally about twenty minutes. My ride this morning was almost an hour long.

Even though the ride was longer, it wasn’t better than normal. Most of the time the animals weren’t on my side of the truck. Added too that was the position and angle of the sun. The animals on my side of the truck were often right in the glare of the sun. I still managed to get a few nice pictures.

After the safari ride I walked all of the animal trails and generally wandered around the park. It was about what I consider to be normal occupancy. The wait times at the popular rides in the Pandora section of the park were over an hour. The other rides had average waits, except for Kali River Rapids. No one, including me, wanted to get wet with temperature in the low seventies. It had no posted wait time and most of the rafts passing by were empty.

My first ride on the safari in the morning had a posted ten minute wait, but it was mostly a walk on. I went back for a second ride on the safari in the afternoon. I had to wait about thirty five minutes for that ride. My position in the truck was very similar to my morning ride. Most of the animals I wanted to see were on the other side of the truck. My view was partially blocked by big people with Mickey Mouse Ears on their heads. This ride lasted the expected twenty minutes and did include a few different animals.

I was back home by mid afternoon. The early in the day visit allowed me to ride the safari twice, but I think the added sleep may have been more valuable. It was a fun day overall. On my next visit I’ll focus more on the shows. Today was the animals.

Wednesday November 1st 2023

For me, today was all about the weather. A cold front passed through the area last night. As a result today was a cloudy, blustery and cold day. There was a strong north wind all day. The temperature never broke the seventy degree mark. Compared to most of the rest of the country that is still quite warm, but I wasn’t mentally prepared. Tomorrow is forecast to be a little brighter and a little warmer, but still below the seasonal normal temperature.

The weather seems to be a major driver in my ambition and energy levels. Waking up this morning to the cool temperatures inside my RV home and the gloomy world outside my windows, I rolled over, pulled up the covers and went back to sleep. When I did get going it was still a gloomy day, but the inside temperature was a little warmer. I didn’t have any desire to leave my RV home until afternoon.

While having breakfast I watched the people walking dogs and the crew mowing the grass in the resort. They were dressed at extremes. Some people were all bundled up in heavy coats, hats and even gloves. Other people, including the lawn crew, were in summer clothes. To me short sleeves and shorts might be the wrong clothes for sixty something temperatures and a twenty mile an hour north wind. When I went out later in the day I wore a sweatshirt over my short sleeve shirt, but still wore shorts. I was comfortable.

The birds that live in and around the park were also acting different today. Most of the ducks were missing. They were probably back in the woods on the far side of the pond. Some of the sandhill cranes were not up and wandering around. For the first time I say two of the cranes sitting on the ground with their legs pulled up under their bodies and their heads back along their backs. It seemed to be an attempt to rest without having to resist the strong wind.