It's less than four weeks until we head out on our Maine to Montana adventure, and so much happens between now and then. It's May Madness 'round here! Three of our four grandchildren have May birthdays (now those three are 18, 10, and 7 years old), this year we also have a high school graduation (Congrats to Madi for her stellar school career and admission to the University of Florida Honors program!), and if that isn't exciting enough, we have a fifth grandbaby due in the next couple of weeks!
In the midst of all that excitement we're gearing up for our summer adventure, taking one last shake down trip. The location - Disney World's Fort Wilderness. We had such a great time in December at Fort Wilderness we decided to return for the Epcot International Flower and Garden Festival. I love this event, so we booked a May visit in conjunction with my birthday (yes, in addition to all the kids' May birthdays, mine is May too). The timing made it perfect for our last tune-up trip before our departure in mid-June.
We weren't disappointed. Once again we thoroughly enjoyed staying at Ft. Wilderness. This time we were in a preferred campsite which put us within easy walking distance to the "Settlement" where the restaurants, trading post, and transportation are located. It was very convenient. Generally the campsites in this area are crowded together, but we lucked out with one at the front of the loop (loop 300) and had terrific privacy and a convenient location to the buses. From the Settlement you can take a boat to Magic Kingdom or Wilderness Lodge, one of our favorite places, or even Epcot if you don't mind making a transfer using the monorail. We also discovered a walking trail from Fort Wilderness to Wilderness Lodge. Breakfast at Whispering Canyon Cafe, located in the Lodge, is always a hoot. Make sure you ask for ketchup. Ha! This trip we also spent part of an afternoon hanging out at the Geyser Point Bar & Grill at the Lodge, which was very relaxing.
Of course, as I said we visited Epcot and the flower festival. As always it was beautiful. I have to say, though, I think Animal Kingdom is becoming one of our favorites. Maybe we've done Epcot so many times we just know it too well. The landscaping at Animal Kingdom is fantastic to me. Disney is genius at creating faraway lands and filling them with incredible greenery and flowers. I love it. It was our first time visiting the Pandora area of this park. Talk about incredible. We found it jaw-dropping. In fact, we enjoyed it so much, we took our grandchildren's advice and went back at night to see all the glowing colors of Pandora. It was the Tree of Life that truly captured our interest, however, both in the daytime and at night. There's so much to see in that one structure. The more you study it, the more you find, and at night the animation Disney creates is stunning. Do you get the idea we enjoyed ourselves? We did!
I plan to do another blog on some Ft Wilderness specifics, particularly the campsite differences. I'm not crazy about the Disney World website, and I don't think they describe or delineate the differences in the campsites very well. So I'll post some information on that for those of you truly interested in camping there. For now, however, we're off to celebrate a high school graduation!!! Be back soon.