Reays on the Road

We hung out by the pool, went fishing on the dock and also on the boat, and just had fun in Sarasota.

We are visiting family in Siesta Key (part of Sarasota, Florida), and decided to try fitting into the driveway, and if it didn’t work, we would find a campground or a place to store the RV for the week and a half.  We tried, and we succeeded.  Now it looks like the RV has always been there and that the trees just grew around it.  Here are some pictures of our parking adventure.
The street…

The entrance to the driveway…

Venturing further in…

Whoa, what’s that hiding in the trees back there?

…oh look, it’s a 35 foot motorhome!

We camped for a long weekend at Disney’s Fort Wilderness Resort and Campground.  We stayed for 5 nights and made our way through 4 parks. We got a great deal staying at the campground. You can find more information about Fort Wilderness and the packages available at their website here.

We will post pictures of and more details about each of the parks in separate posts. We purchased the cheapest base tickets (not the park-hoppers and not the non-expiring ones) so we went to one park per day. We also purchased the quick service meal plan, but found that with the times we chose to go into the parka (to avoid the long lines and crowds) we really had to find ways to use them so that they didn’t go to waste. Other than the last park (Hollywood Studios) where Daddy brought the girls while Mommy worked, we were able to get through the parks and go on all of the rides with no more than 20 minutes in line. Some tips we used include:

1) take full advantage of the Extra Magic Hours, where Disney keeps one park per day open for either an extra 2 or 3 hours at night or opens an extra hour early.

2) avoid the peak times between about 11am and 4 or 5 pm. (For some parks, we actually waited until 3 or 4 pm and stayed in the park until we were done…since it was open until midnight with Extra Magic hours. For others, we went in for opening first thing in the morning, came out for lunch and a nap and them went back in for the late afternoon and evening.)

3) we should have followed this one, but learned the hard way: Magic Kingdom is probably better (less crowded) on the weekdays. We went on Saturday and it was MOBBED by 11 am and still quite packed when we went back in at 4pm.

Daddy took the girls in to Hollywood Studios during the day while Mommy worked back at the campground.  The place was very busy, but we made it through.  Adrianna even got her face painted! Here are some pictures of what we saw.

On Sunday, we went to the Magic Kingdom. We went just before opening, and went all the way to the back of the park first. We hit no lines all morning, and left at around 11 to go back to the campground for lunch and a nap. We went back in around 5pm and spent until just after the fireworks, and we didn’t miss a thing!

On Saturday we went to the Animal Kingdom! We went all the way to the back of the park to go on the Safari ride, and we got on with a pretty short line and got to see LOTS of animals! We saved the water ride for last, thanks to the good advice our good friends gave us, so Mommy and Katelynn were only soaked for the walk and bus rides back to the campground instead of all day long.

On Friday, we went into Epcot after Mommy finished working for the day, and after Daddy and the girls took naps, and we stayed in until the park almost the entire night, since Extra Magic Hours went until midnight! We were able to do everything that the girls wanted to and only stand in very short lines, if any at all, because of our choice in timing. This made it a very enjoyable evening.

We made it to Florida!  On the way down, we decided to stop for the night at a state park.  Little did we know that it would be calm, quiet, beautiful, and cheap!   

We took an excursion with a good friend to Stone Mountain, Georgia and went tubing on man-made snow, saw a Yogi Bear 4D show, took a ride on the skyline up to the top of Stone Mountain and hiked back down.  We had a beautiful view of the lake from our campsite.

We visited our eleventh state capitol in Atlanta, Georgia.  The girls learned that the state bird or Georgia is the Brown Thrasher, the state flower is the Cherokee Rose, and that Georgia is called the Peach State.  They also learned that The Great Okefenokee Swamp is the biggest swamp in North America.  Its Seminole name means “land of trembling earth.”