Part 2
Monday, December 9
-It started raining before dawn. I'm not sure exactly what time because I was too sleepy to turn over and peek at the clock. I remember hoping that we had slanted the awning enough to handle the water and then drifted off again. Still raining when we woke up, I guess around 8:00. It would continue to rain all day and all that night. I'm not talking about an on-and-off rain or a light drizzle. I'm talking about the kind of rain that puts you in mind of a 40 day deluge. Steady, relentless rain. What a mess. And it lasted most of the week. :-( So much for our plans of riding our bikes around FW.
- This would be a good time to talk about our plans. As I warned in the first part of my trip report, this trip was not as much of a park oriented trip, as it was a camping trip that happened to take place at WDW, at least for the first part of the week. We always attend the Annual RADP [rec.arts.disney.parks newsgroup] Meet, and we usually go just before all the meets begin. This year, we wanted to have some down time in the campground before the whirl of the Big Meet weekend started. We bought our AP [Annual Pass] vouchers last spring but didn't plan on exchanging the vouchers for the passes until Friday (so they would still be good throughout our entire trip next December). We planned on spending lots of time exploring FW, attending the campfire and movie, spending time at DD [Downtown Disney], and touring the resorts. Much of the week's rain kept us from most of these pastimes. If I had it to do over again, I think we would have gotten our AP's earlier than planned and spent that time in the parks. I love the parks during the rain. They empty out and you pretty much have them to yourselves.
-After showers and breakfast, we discussed how to use this dreary, rainy day and decided on an excursion to Camping World and then our grocery store run. There is no Camping World near home and we were anxious to check it out. We set out and followed the signs to 192. We passed a Macaroni Grill and decided to come back there for lunch later. We had a ball at Camping World. I guess you would have to be a camping person to understand how someone could spend their first day at WDW there. :-) After a few purchases, we headed to a late lunch. Neither of us had been to Macaroni Grill before and we definitely liked it. Especially the bread! Yum! Next, grocery shopping at Walmart and then home to the camper. It was so much fun unloading all those groceries in the rain. :-/
-Since it was raining too hard to do much else, I decided to catch up on laundry. I know it's really frowned on by some to gripe about the prices of things at WDW, but I must say a word about the price of doing laundry there. Yikes! $2.00 for each load in the washing machine and $3.00 to dry the load. I don't remember it being this expensive in the past. One difference that I noticed right away was that in the 300 loop, there are none of the big commercial sized dryers. They have smaller ones that take forever and positively eat quarters. Especially when you are staying as long as we did and still want clean clothes every day. :-) We spent $25 doing laundry during our stay. We could have found an off-site laundry and saved some money, but the convenience of doing it on-site outweighed the savings. Okay, rant over. :-)
-After supper in the camper, we watched the Monday night game and went to sleep around midnight. Not a very exciting first day, I know. :-)
Tuesday, December 10
-Since there was no rush to get to a park, we set the clock for 8:00. Showers, breakfast.....such creatures of habit. :-) We decided to look up our friend Randy Berbaum, who always camps in the 2000 loop. We wondered how he was doing with all this rain. Randy tent camps and I thought of him all day Monday. For those who don't know Randy, he is truly one of a kind. He is a bonafide phenomenon. Randy sets up a tent and then puts up a huge tarp over the whole campsite to protect his monorail set-up which is absolutely unbelievable! No words can describe this. You really have to see it to believe it. Hundreds of feet of track. Multiple monorails. Stations and resorts set up all along the tracks. Spaceship Earth illuminated just like the real one. The Contemporary all lit up from inside. Randy has even designed and built an MGM station. Every year, the set-up grows and gets bigger and more complicated. It takes up his whole campsite. I've taken still pictures but they don't do it justice. I planned on using my camcorder this year.
-We found Randy's site without any trouble, but all was not well. On Monday afternoon while Randy was in the parks, his campsite flooded out. He got back to find almost everything ruined. Many of the motors were under water and filled with sand. He had spent most of the night getting rid of the water which kept collecting in the low spots of the tarp and digging a trench to try and channel the water on the ground away from his campsite. He had had problems the week before, but nothing like this. He had repaired that damage, but this was much worse. I felt so bad for him! I remarked that he certainly was taking this better than I would have. His reply was that we should have seen him earlier that morning. :-) We asked if we could help but Randy said there wasn't much anyone else could do. With all those switches and electronics and wires, I know he was right. I would have been totally lost. :-)
-We headed out to Orlando to do some shopping at the Character Warehouse, stopping for lunch at Red Lobster while we were out. We didn't find too much that interested us at the store. We bought a few of the 30th Anniversary mugs and a few other souvenirs. then headed back for a nap in the camper.
-When we woke up, the rain had finally stopped. It was a good thing. I was starting to get a little cabin fever.....make that camper fever, and needed to get some exercise and some fresh air. We took a walk, exploring our loop and then headed toward the Settlement area. We got some coffee at Trail's End and sat in the rockers on the porch and people watched. This is one of our favorite things to do at FW. It is so peaceful sitting there near the huge Christmas tree, listening to the music and watching the people scurrying to and fro. So much hurrying. While we rock. We must be getting old. :-/
-While we sat there, who should come by but one of our friends from RADP, Jack (Troublemaker) Marshall! :-) He was meeting a few other RADPers and attending Hoop-Dee-Doo that night. So, he sat with us and chatted until the rest of the party showed up. Soon Catherine, Lori and Kevin arrived. More chatting and catching up to do. We hadn't seen each other since last December. It was so great to see everyone again. It was time for them to head to Pioneer Hall so we said goodbye for the time being. We would see each other again later in the week. Mike and I stopped at the Settlement Trading Post and did a little shopping before heading back to the camper. A little TV and then bed. The weather was supposed to be really nice tomorrow and we wanted to take full advantage of it.
Next......Sun, glorious sun!