Current Location: Fort Wilderness Campground, Orlando, Florida

We had a fun and productive visit with David this past week. After we got there on Monday, he drove over to the campground and we went out to eat dinner at a restaurant called Newk’s Eatery. It was pretty good food. We visited for a bit and David headed back home.

Malcolm worked during the day on Tuesday. David came over after working a little late. We went out to eat dinner again, this time at a really great British restaurant called Eat my Pasty. It’s a locally run place with excellent food. Malcolm had the Fish and Chips, David had a really good burger and Val had a Chicken Pot Pie Pasty. It was all delicious.

FIsh and Chips

We took the car in to the local Ford dealer to get an oil change and tire rotation. Since this is the first service at Ford since we bought the car (used), Malcolm asked if they could pull up the service history on the car. They could only pull up warranty history as service history is kept only by the local dealer where it has been serviced. They did find that no warranty claims had ever been worked on. Hopefully the car will remain as reliable in the years to come.

We visited with David a couple more times while we were in the area. On Friday, we went to his house and spent the day. We used his internet to update all our devices. Malcolm got a little work done and we also took dinner over to cook there. For lunch, David treated us to lunch and free bowling at the alley on base.

Bowling with David

While at Lowe’s looking for something else, we found this cute flamingo. It was the only one they had, so we bought their display model. It’s nice and heavy compared to the pair of plastic flamingos we bought this past summer.

The new flamingo

On Friday evening we said our goodbyes to David. Saturday morning we got all packed up to leave and headed out fairly early. We drove up to I-10, then headed east to I-75. We took I-75 a few miles south and stopped overnight at Casey Jones Campground near Lake City. Our final destination is Walt Disney World. We find it is easier to make it a two day trip instead of packing it all in one single driving day from Panama City. We left the trailer hooked to the truck overnight since we were on a fairly level spot.

This morning we were up a bit early, but we had to pace our time. Since check-in at Fort Wilderness Campground starts at 1:00 PM, we try to leave Casey Jones at around 9:30 am. We decided to head up to the next exit and eat breakfast at Cracker Barrel. Malcolm won three $25 gift cards for Cracker Barrel at the office Christmas party so we used one of those to pay for our meal.

Time for breakfast

We got back to the trailer (which we had packed up and gotten ready to go before we left for breakfast) around 9:15. After a quick bathroom break, we were on the road right around 9:30 as planned. We stopped at the first service plaza on the Florida Turnpike to fill up the truck with fuel and to grab a bite to eat for lunch. We took our time as we were a little ahead of schedule. Once we got done eating, it was around noon, which was when we needed to leave to get to Disney around 1:00, which was about when we got there.

We’re here!

It took a bit to get checked in (typical when you arrive at 1:00), but we were rolling up to our site before 2:00. It was a quick back-in and unhook. Malcolm took the truck over to long-term parking. Val followed in the car and brought him back to the site where we finished setting up. We spent the afternoon setting up outdoor stuff and hanging our Mickey Mouse lights and other decorations.

All set up.

We cooked dinner at the trailer – spaghetti in the Instant Pot. Afterwards, we headed down to Disney Springs (the shopping and restaurant district) to get our annual passes started up. They issued us our annual pass cards and we were on our way. We did some light shopping before heading back to the trailer for the evening.

We’ll be here for two weeks. With the annual passes, we’ve got a lot of flexibility on what we do each day. We don’t even have to head to any of the parks if we don’t want to. We are heading down to the Tampa RV Supershow one day this week. Otherwise, we’re leaving everything open.