I got a late start to the day. Yesterday’s Disney visit ended late enough that it took several hours before I wound down. When I got up this morning the sun was high in the sky and I was down another neighbor. The number of empty sites in the RV park continues to increase.
I found one accessible Magnolia tree at Disney, but could get a very good picture of a blossom.
Today’s weather forecast called for a slight chance of rain. Tomorrow it increases to about 40 percent. This area really needs some rain. It really only rained once for more than a few minutes in the last month. The summer weather pattern of nearly daily rain showers hasn’t arrived.
Duck swimming in the Rivers of America. The green color is mostly caused by the reflection from the nearby trees.
The grass in the RV park is turning brown. This past weeks visit from the lawn mowing crew turned into a couple of guys wandering around with string trimmers. I don’t think the mowers were even unloaded from their trailer. Another sign of the drought in the local area is at Disney World. They have suspended water transportation in the Disney Springs area of the park. I am kind of surprised because most of the bodies of water I’ve seen appear to be at a normal level.
This egret has become a real scavenger around Liberty Square at the Magic Kingdom.
Overall today wasn’t very eventful. I thought it was Sunday most of the day. A couple of errands out of the park were very random and not particularly productive. The pictures in this blog entry are from yesterday’s visit to the Magic Kingdom.
The highlight of today’s activities was a visit to Disney’s Magic Kingdom this evening. My plan was to ride a few attractions, get some dinner and watch the Happily Ever After Fireworks show. For the most part it was a successful evening.
The park wasn’t overly busy so it was easy to ride the non thrill rides and watch shows. For dinner I had a nice lobster roll at Columbia Harbor House. It was much better than their fried seafood platter that I have had in the past. The only down side to the evening was that I didn’t get a chance to watch the fireworks from the front of the castle on Main Street USA. My ride on Buzz Light Years Space Ranger Spin took longer than I expected. I didn’t have time to fight the crowds to get to Main street once I got off the ride and it probably would have been filled. Instead I watched the fireworks from the back side in Frontier Land. It is still a very impressive show from there.
A nice east breeze returned today. It made the time of bright sunshine a little more endurable. Late in the day the cloud cover thickened enough to also contribute to making the day more comfortable. Once again the temperature peaked in the upper eighties.
Clouds moving in across Lake Davenport during the late afternoon.
There seemed to be a lot of activity in the campground overnight. I woke up several times to sounds around me in the park. It is possible that I was just sleeping lighter than usual, but it sounded a lot more active than normal. In addition to cars driving around in the park around 2 or 3AM, there were odd noises and extra lights around the campground several times. I think it was just one of those nights.
This morning everything seemed normal. The only surprise was the departure of a couple of neighbors that I thought would be here long term. The number of RVs in the park has decreased substantially and many of the RVs still here are not occupied. I recall watching a similar exodus out in Arizona in 2020. That year I interrupted my travels to sit tight for the months of April and May while traveling during the COVID pandemic figured itself out. A few RVs would leave every day until the number stabilized on a mostly empty RV resort. A similar behavior seems to be happening here.
Today’s big activity was very tame by comparison to my visits to the theme parks. I walked to the shore of Lake Davenport behind the clubhouse. There are several Adirondack style chairs that are a comfortable place to watch the activity on the lake from the shade of tall trees. There were several Jet Ski boats racing up and down the lake this afternoon.
Today was a slow day without a lot of accomplishment. It felt much warmer today even though the actual temperature was about the same as yesterday. There wasn’t as much wind and the sun never found a cloud to hide behind.
The floating planters filled with impatiences really adds interest to the water.
Yesterday’s blog entry was rushed and included mostly pictures. In this entry I will include a few more pictures from yesterday’s visit to EPCOT and describe a few of the things I did and saw. Overall it was one of my more relaxed and enjoyable visits to EPCOT in awhile.
I think this little dog topiary has something to do with the new Wish movie.
EPCOT wasn’t as busy as it has been on recent visits. There were still a lot of people there, but lines were much shorter. In fact, I had a solo ride through the Living with the Land green houses. I sat in the front row of a two boat flotilla with no one else in either boat. It was a timing fluke. There was almost a full pair of boats in front and behind me. Another first that was kind of fun. I also was able to walk right onto Spaceship Earth and the Three Caballeros in the Mexico pavilion.
The rows behind me in the two boat set coming out of the tunnel into the Living with the Lands Garden. I had a private boat.
Every night during the International Flower and Garden Festival a concert is held in three sets at the American Gardens theater. Friday through Monday the performance is by a nationally know group. Often it is the remnants of a popular group from the 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s. During the week tribute bands and groups from the Orlando area perform. On Tuesday night it was an Orlando based Country/Southern Rock band called Southbound playing. They were OK, but could benefit from better technical support. Whoever was adjusting sound levels didn’t do them any favors. The drums drowned out everything. Even during a song featuring the fiddle in the band, you couldn’t hear the fiddle. Keep in mind I know nothing about music, I just thought it was wrong.
The Butterfly tent setup for the festival was really packed with butterflies in the late afternoon. I usually see butterflies hiding from people of the back sides of the plants near the tent walls and on the tent walls themselves. Yesterday, in addition to the usual places, butterflies were all over the place. There were plenty of them flying around, landing on blossoms, landing on little kids posing as statues to encourage them to stop by and dive bombing adults trying to walk through the exhibit. They were plentiful enough that it was easy to find butterflies stopped on blossoms for picture taking.
For the evening fireworks in the World Showcase lagoon I kept walking around the World Showcase stopping here and there to take a picture or two. Once again the lower crowd level made this possible. The lagoon shore was only line with people a few rows deep. The walkways were empty. I’ve been there when the walkways remained jam packed throughout the fireworks display. On this visit it was easy to pause behind the stationary watchers whenever a good part of the display started.
Today’s big activity was a late day visit to Disney’s EPCOT. I got there a little after 4PM and stayed until the Luminous Fireworks, Laser and Fountain show was over around 9:30PM. The International Flower and Garden Festival is still in full swing. I took lots of pictures of Flowers, Topiaries, Butterflies and the Fireworks. It is late in the evening as I’m writing this blog entry, so I’m going to just present the pictures in this blog entry. Tomorrow, I may write more about my visit to Epcot.
I got a slow start to the day. It was after 3PM when I departed the RV park which turns out to at the heart of the school release time. I had to stop for several school buses and got caught in the traffic around two different schools.
The whole getting to and from school in this area is so different from what I’m used to. Granted that there are many many years since I was in school and I grew up in an urban environment, but I just don’t get it. Every school bus stop seems to have multiple cars waiting for the kids to get off the bus. Maybe it makes sense for the lower elementary school grades particularly in the fall, but today I even saw the behavior with a couple of kids that looked like high school age. Can’t these kids walk a few hundred yards to their homes?
The other phenomena regards picking up the kids from school. Today I encountered two very long line of cars at the schools I passed by. The lines were so long they blocked traffic on the road for several hundred yards in both directions. Once the cars made it into the school yard they had to snake their way up to the doors to load their precious cargo. Meanwhile those of us just trying to drive by the school had to dodge the waiting cars and the arriving and departing school buses. Once again, in my day, getting picked up was the exception not the norm. I can only recall a handful of waiting cars on any given day. I must really be turning into an old fuddy duddy.
Walking around the RV resort today I saw more indications of departures. It is really starting to look empty in some areas. Clearly, I can’t figure out how who is going to leave and when. Some of the ones I observe have departed were on my list of probable full time residents. They go from fully setup with fancy patio structures and plants all around to an empty site in no time. At the same time new RVs arrive at the sites around me. Clearly this part of the massive campground is getting used for new arrivals right now.
Today’s weather was pretty much a clone of yesterday’s. What was different was my activity level. After a leisurely morning, I headed to Sea World in the afternoon.
Getting to Sea World from here, well southwest of Orlando is a bit of a challenge. Sea World is directly south of Orlando and a little northeast of Disney World. To get there from here you need to go around Disney or through it. If you chose to go around Disney you encounter the traffic on Interstate 4 which is usually filled with stop and go traffic. Consequently, I decided to go through Walt Disney World. The traffic was heavy going through Disney and north on International Drive, but it kept moving. When I passed Interstate 4, it was indeed a traffic nightmare.
Sea World was busy when I arrived at 1:30PM. The main parking lot was close to full and it looked like they were working on opening the maxillary parking lot. When parking at Sea World, you are pretty much on your own. There are not lots of people directing you where to park in a systematic basis. Instead you follow the car in front of you until you find a place you like. When I departed later, there were cars running up and down the rows looking for empty spaces.
Once I got through security and into the park, the crowds were heavy, but not unmanageable. There were empty seats at the shows. The bigger problem was the narrow walkways near the construction walls that surround the area of the new Penguin roller coaster. There were also a couple of walkways that were closed off because of this construction. In these areas the crowds slowed down and thickened making for slow going.
My arrival time didn’t match up well with the park show schedule. I only saw the Dolphin show. The times for the Sea Lion and the Orca shows just didn’t line up with my wanderings. The dolphin show was a little different from my last visit in February. I think in the warmer weather the trainers interact in the water to a higher degree. Today three trainers dived into the tank to dance and interact with the dolphins. The dolphin show is always great and today was no exception.
After making a couple of loops around the park and checking out the various attractions and exhibits the crowds started to increase. The Seven Seas Food Festival is still going on during the weekends at Sea World. Saturdays and Sundays end with a concert. Tonight’s artist was Ludacris. I suspect people were arriving to see the rapper, but it was my time to leave. I was back at my RV home by 6PM.
I woke up this morning to the wind. It was noisily blowing the blinds in the open windows and the slide toppers outside. The wind was the dominant element of the day. The east wind was blowing in the mid teens all day. There were a few periods of gusts that rocked my RV home. Along with the wind came clouds. As the day went by the sky transitioned from a few clouds to a thick layer of white and gray. The high temperature for the day was in the low eighties.
This campground has a small area of frontage at the northern end of Lake Davenport. It is a long walk through the campground from my site to the clubhouse at the lake shore. There is a nice area to sit and watch the activity on the lake behind the clubhouse. Whenever I watch the activity on the lake, I see of personal water crafts with their water jet based propulsion systems racing up and down the lake. The source of these crafts is at the southern end of the lake at the boat launch in the Polk County Northeast Regional Park.
Today I visited the Northeast Regional Park. Most of what I saw today were athletic fields. A baseball game was in progress on one of them. The soccer pitch and other fields weren’t in use. Another area that had a lot of activity was around the boat launch onto Lake Davenport. There were picnic tables with charcoal grills that were very popular in this area also. The big draw was a Jet Ski rental concession at the boat launch ramp. A huge trailer that held ten Jet Skis was parked beside the ramp. Three Jet Skis were on the trailer. The rest were in the water churning up wakes on the lake. It appeared to be a popular activity.
One thing that I wanted to find at the Northeast Regional Park was walking trails. There didn’t seem to be anything that met my needs. The area was extensive and there were plenty of sidewalks, but I wouldn’t call them trails. There also was a foliage and water features that would attract birds and other critters.
There were a few more clouds in the sky today. It wasn’t completely overcast, but there was more white than blue in the sky most of the day. An east wind also made its presence known. Consequently the temperature was a couple of degrees cooler than Thursday.
Camoflage bunny
This was another day filled with chores around the RV and a few errands in the area. It didn’t result in any real blog worthy content. The primary errand was a grocery run. I suspect I’m going to the grocery store a little more frequently than during the winter months, because I’m spending about twenty dollars less a visit. The items I purchase haven’t changed and the prices certainly haven’t gone down.
Walking around the RV resort this evening didn’t show any obvious weekend guests. The last couple of weekends there were weekend residents. With all the vacant sites it is getting hard to identify new arrivals if you don’t see them coming in.
The drop in temperature at the beginning of the week has gone away with a few degrees increase every day. Today’s high was back in the upper eighties with increasing humidity. The current forecast calls for mid nineties by the middle of next week.
A visitor along the lake front.
This was a quick day. I did lots of little things around my RV home without paying much attention to the clock. It was around 5PM before I was ready for my walk around the campground. Today was the first day since Tuesday that I walked to the lower part of the campground near the lake. There were a lot more empty sites today. I think the approaching end of the month has a lot to do with it. Many of campgrounds up north begin there summer season on May 1st. Some folks that winter in Florida move their RVs to seasonal sites up north for the summer.
I observed one departure near me today. An Oregon registered motorhome pulled in its slides, unplugged from the utilities and departed mid afternoon today. The couple that belong with the motorhome are slow moving folks that don’t strike me as returning to Oregon. They have a truck registered in Florida that isn’t pulled behind the motorhome, so that departure will remain a mystery. They didn’t take the motorhome to the storage yard.
Rob's Rambling Road Trip 