Friday December 15th 2023

Today was the day for my much anticipated visit to Disney’s Fort Wilderness Campground to see how the campers have decorated their campsites. I try to do this every year I’m in the area. This year I combined the trip to the campground with an afternoon at Disney’ Magic Kingdom. The park closed at 6PM to allow for the separate admission Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party. I got there at about 1PM and escaped on the Launch to Fort Wilderness shortly after 5PM. The park was very crowed when I arrived and down right impossible to navigate when I departed. The Christmas party guests were allowed to enter at 4PM.

While I was at the Magic Kingdom I checked off another must do for the holiday season. I rode the Jingle Cruise. This is the regular Jungle Cruise decorated for Christmas with the puns delivered by the boat skippers changed to a Christmas theme. I didn’t think they did as much Christmas decorating this year, but it is still a fun attraction.

A little rain occurred while I was on the boat to Fort Wilderness. It was cloudy and threatening all day, but for the most part today was just a wind event. It was dry again when I arrived at the campground and began my walk around the loops near the settlement. Since it is still ten days to Christmas a lot of sites are not decorated yet. Also, I think there were more empty sites in Fort Wilderness than I’ve ever seen before. The horrible weekend weather forecast may be at fault. Spending more than $200 dollars a night to be subject to more than 2 inches of rain Saturday night into Sunday may be the breaking point for some.

I didn’t spend a lot of time at Fort Wilderness. I only walked through five loops near the boat launch. I didn’t have the motivation to walk through the other fourteen camping loops like I did at Halloween. The boat was arriving at the dock when I walked up for my trip back to the Magic Kingdom. It took several monorails filled with people before I boarded one to get back to the parking lot.