Happy Thanksgiving

OK, so I know I said we would spend the Thanksgiving week on the the Space Coast parked at the Cocoa Elks, but instead we are parked at Millennium Coach, just off the St. Johns River in Sanford, Florida (map). Millennium has a spacious customer parking area, complete with 50-amp power and water, with room for perhaps two dozen coaches.

Good friends and fellow nomadic bus-dwellers Ben and Karen, who met us for dinner Monday evening, had extended a very gracious invitation to join them for Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant in Orlando. They are here at Millennium having some work done on their bus, and Tuesday they secured permission from the company for us to come join them here for a few days so we could spend the holiday together. It was very generous of Millennium to agree, and after Ben called us with the good news, we fueled up at a nearby station and headed north to Sanford.

In a short while we'll all pile into Karen's super-cute Mini Cooper and head down to the Drunken Monkey Coffee Bar to enjoy the "Thanksgiving Dinner for EVERYONE" which includes vegan and non-vegan options. And many thanks to Ben and Karen not only for inviting us to join them but also for providing transportation.

Since we had a water spigot available and our two buses are the only rigs here, we set the hot tub up yesterday and enjoyed a nice soak last night, after a nice dinner at Efe's restaurant on the lake near downtown, serving authentic Turkish cuisine. None of us had previously dined at a restaurant claiming to be Turkish, but fans of other Mediterranean cuisines will find many of the offerings familiar. The four of us split a large appetizer sampler, which really would have been enough for dinner on its own. Louise and I also shared a lamb sis kebap, which was excellent. The place was nearly empty and I would definitely call it a hidden treasure.

The invitation to come up here and our consequent decision to do so instead of heading to Cocoa now seems prescient, as NASA has since delayed the shuttle launch until no sooner than December 17th. We'll probably stay right here until the end of this weekend, then we are again somewhat at loose ends until the Nordhavn Open House in Stuart on the 10th. We may still drop by the Space Coast on the 7th to watch the COTS-1 launch, though I suspect it is not nearly as spectacular as a shuttle.

All of us here aboard Odyssey wish you and your families a very happy Thanksgiving holiday.

Photo by kate e. did, used under a Creative Commons license.

One more day in Orlando

We are again at our industrial-park boondocking spot in Orlando (map), about 18 miles from Disney's Fort Wilderness. We arrived here late Friday evening, after again spending the day Friday in the overflow lot at Disney. Fort Wilderness gave us a late checkout to noon (from 11am), so we could enjoy a leisurely buffet breakfast at the Trails End restaurant in the campground before moving to the overflow area.

We had already used up our five-day parks passes, so we spent the afternoon at Disney's Grand Floridian Hotel, the flagship resort at Disney World. Disney has done a great job giving the place the look and some of the feel of a grand-dame hotel from the turn of the (20th) century, with sweeping public spaces and cast members in period costume. Any illusion that you might actually be in such a place, like, for example, the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, or the Greenbrier in West Virginia, is immediately shattered once you encounter the actual guests, who are generally dressed for a theme park visit with oft-screaming children in tow.

In addition to two pools, both much nicer than the ones at the campground or even some of the other resorts, this property also sports Disney's in-house wedding venue, and as we passed through the lobby a wedding party was having photos taken. A cast member in waistcoat, boater, and spats followed the bride everywhere tending her train; he looked old enough to have been a bellman at the actual Grand back in its heyday. The lobby also housed an enormous Christmas tree as well as an actual gingerbread house large enough for three cast members to be running a store inside of it. A small orchestra played softly on a balcony overlooking the atrium; Louise chatted them up and they've been playing there more or less continuously for two decades.



Besides wandering around the hotel and the grounds, we enjoyed a glass of wine at a quiet bar behind the orchestra. The wine here is more expensive than at the other resorts, but we decided it was the cheap way to enjoy the hotel -- rooms here start at $410 per night in the cheap season and one can easily drop two grand a night on a two-bedroom suite. This was also the classiest cocktail lounge we'd encountered at Disney, and they even put out mixed nuts with the cocktails. Again the illusion of elegance was shattered when other guests entered with passels of small children; call me a curmudgeon but I have grown to appreciate states where bars, at least, are the last bastion of adults-only relaxation. Seriously, with literally dozens of other child-friendly and appropriate venues in this one hotel alone (including some serving alcohol), why would parents bring children to a cocktail lounge?

The Grand Floridian is also home to Disney's lone Mobil 4-star, AAA 5-diamond restaurant, Victoria & Albert's, and we peered in through the glass to check it out. The place is nearly impossible to get into, reservations selling out well in advance, and besides which I am not fond of the prix-fixe format with limited offerings daily. The modern Citrico's next door was more appealing, but it was too early for dinner and we instead lingered over our wine before boarding the monorail back to the Contemporary resort, where we'd need to catch the boat back to Fort Wilderness. On a lark we asked about walk-ins at the upscale California Grille on the top floor, and were surprised to be handed a pager and whisked onto the elevator.

As with all of Disney it was overpriced, but the food was fresh and tasty and the view is spectacular. We just caught the last of the sunset as we settled in to the bar to await our table, and we had a view out over the Magic Kingdom in all its holiday finery while we dined. Dinner here gets you access to the rooftop viewing platform for the fireworks, but we were unwilling to wait two hours and so we simply went straight to the dock after dinner.

In all we had a nice stay at Disney this year, much less crowded and hectic than our last stay with our friends at Christmas week. Even though it is not yet Thanksgiving, most of the parks and resorts are already fully decorated for the holidays, and we again were treated to the spectacle that is the Osborne Family Lights at the Hollywood Studios. No photos this time but you can see my earlier feeble attempts from our last visit. We also hit some new-to-us dining venues on this visit, including Il Mulino in the Swan, Mama Melrose's at Hollywood Studios, and Artist's Point in the Wilderness Lodge.

This latter property, by the way, attempts to capture the essence of the great lodges of the national parks. The lobby atrium looks to be lifted straight from the Old Faithful Inn, with other elements taken from the Ahwahnee, El Tovar, the Furnace Creek Inn, and perhaps the Crater Lake Lodge. There are odd juxtapositions of Tlingit totem poles and plains indian headdresses, southwest sandstone adjacent to pacific northwest lumber, and, most importantly stately grand lodge elegance with hordes of Disney guests sporting mouse ears and blinky lights. One can almost imagine being in Yellowstone sipping a glass of wine in the comfy atrium chairs until someone in the adjacent and ironically-named Whispering Canyon restaurant bellows "I need ketchup!"

After a full five days on campus, we were definitely ready for a break from the mouse. The campground is actually, relatively speaking, an oasis of calm and tranquility on the property, notwithstanding the over-the-top decorations on some of the sites, many of which were already in place (including the same gentleman I wrote about last time). In hindsight we should have budgeted more time at the campground and less at the parks. In any case, it is all behind us for this visit and we're happy to be back to our more mundane life which, apparently, consists mostly of living in parking lots.

Our plan had been to spend just one or perhaps two nights here before moving on to someplace less conspicuous and more holiday-friendly for the week. I spent most of the day Saturday doing research on where, exactly, that might be, and we've decided on the Cocoa Elks, where we've stayed previously. In addition to being a short walk from downtown and many dining venues, there are several resort hotels within easy scooter distance, and one of them is sure to have a decent Thanksgiving spread. Beyond that, it is a short drive to Titusville, and we are hoping to again catch a shuttle launch, tentatively scheduled for the night of December second.

We'd already be en route, but we learned last week that our friends Ben and Karen are nearby, in Sanford, about a half hour or so north of here. For a while it looked like they might be in Orlando on Friday, and we tentatively planned to meet them for dinner at Downtown Disney, but their trip was postponed to today and so we will meet them here for dinner tonight instead. They live in a Prevost but are working on downsizing into a classic Flxible, and they have a travel history much like ours, but with better photos.

So tonight will make four nights in this spot, and in the morning we will start rolling east to Cocoa. Had I realized we'd be here this long, I would have tried to take on fuel on our way here -- the tank level is below the generator dip tube, and we finally needed to charge the batteries last night. Fortunately there is only a very small fuel penalty to using the main engine and its massive 6.5kW alternator to charge the batteries on fast idle, and between 20 minutes last night and another 20 this morning we are in good shape. I expect to need another 20 minutes tonight as well.

As it stands now our plan is to be in Cocoa through the end of the week, hovering around the Space Coast for the possible shuttle launch and/or the COTS-1 rocket launch on December 7th. We will then head south to Stuart for a boat open house on the 10th. Sometime in the following two weeks I'd like to get to Lakeland for an oil change and some other service on the bus, which will take us up to Christmas. We have no idea yet where we will spend that holiday, but immediately afterward is the annual bus rally in Arcadia. We'll then have two weeks to make our way back to the east coast in the Fort Pierce area for Louise's training cruise, after which we will make our way back to Fort Lauderdale for Trawler Fest.

Orange photo by LoneGunMan; orchestra photo by Samantha Decker; both used under a Creative Commons license.

Back at the House of Mouse

We are at Disney's Fort Wilderness Resort, in the 1700 loop (map) where we stayed a few years ago and just across the way from where we were at Christmas, 2008. We pulled in yesterday around 2ish, after having spent Saturday night at our secret spot in an industrial park across town (map), where we'd also parked back then on either end of our Disney stay, and again on our way north to the inauguration. It would appear that the building next door has not had a tenant since we vacated it at the end of 2008.

After we checked in and got the handout on this week's park hours, we learned that last night was the only evening of our stay with "Extra Magic Hours" for the Magic Kingdom, from 8-11, and so we decided to hit the park after a light dinner at Crockett's Tavern here in Fort Wilderness. In stark contrast to our last experience at Christmas week, the park was virtually empty, and we whizzed right on to Space Mountain, Pirates of the Caribbean, and many other attractions that normally have at least some wait. It was odd to be in the Haunted Mansion with so few people that the guides could not even use their standard joke about filling in all the "dead" space.

The park was, in fact, so empty that we managed to see and do absolutely all of it between the end of "Wishes", for which we arrived right on time at 8pm, and park closing at 11, and I dare say we don't need to return to the Magic Kingdom on this visit. And while it may seem wasteful to have blown a park admission ticket on a mere three hours, in fact I picked up a pair of 5-day passes at the 3-day rate at one of the many ticket discounters in Orlando Saturday afternoon. We really had only been shopping for a 4-day pass anyway, giving us essentially one "free" day we didn't need, so the last-minute decision to visit the park last night was easy.

Staying out till past 11, by the time the boat brought us back from the park and we rode back to our site, really knocked us out, and here we are still sitting around the bus at 3pm. This afternoon we will head off to Disney's Hollywood Studios, where again we have "Extra Magic Hours" till 11pm (the park closes to non-resort guests at 8). I'm hoping to get in to the Brown Derby there for dinner tonight, even though we could not get a reservation. We have reservations at Il Mulino in the Swan, a short boat ride away, as a backup.

These extra resort-guest only hours at the parks is one of the great perks of staying at Fort Wilderness. On some days the extra hours are in the morning, and on others they are in the evening, but we're never up and ready to go even when these parks open at their normal hours, so having an extra hour starting at 7am is not for us. Besides which, the extra morning hours tend to be busier than the evening ones, considering the number of families here with small children. That said, we still saw plenty of toddlers at 11pm, struggling to stay awake, being dragged around the Magic Kingdom by parents intent on squeezing every cent from their admission tickets.



We were once again very lucky to get the satellite on-line here, with all of the pets-allowed camping loops in the park being under heavy tree cover. We're shooting through perhaps a 4' wide gap in tree cover a good 60' up, and I think we'd be off-line if I moved the bus a foot in any direction. Even so the signal strength is a bit low and the best symbol rate the system will allow me is the first step of three available, so things are a bit slower than normal.

We're looking forward to a very pleasant stay and another three or four park visits before our scheduled departure on Friday. I again expect that we will then just roll across town for another casual night in our stealth spot before having to leave Orlando for points unknown. I'm afraid I have not done any real work on where we will head next, and, of course, the Thanksgiving holiday will mean we need to be settled in someplace before the hordes of holiday campers descend on all the good spots.

Ever-changing travel plans

We are at the Elks Lodge in Stuart, Florida (map), a familiar stop for us. On Monday I wrote that we'd leave the Delray Beach Elks for West Palm Beach on Thursday, but we decided instead to spend one more night there and bypass West Palm altogether, landing here instead, a bit further along our intended route.

That gave us a chance to try out Da Da, just a few blocks from our parking spot in Delray, on recommendation from reader, friend, and fellow blogger Where is Ben. It was quite good, and a perfect night for dining on the extensive patio. It also gave us a chance to walk into Stuart last night and eat at the Key Lime Cafe, kind of a mix between Caribbean and Southwestern cuisine. Again we had a nice evening on the patio, listening to Jimmy Buffet on the sound system, at least until the live music started at 7, which consisted of one white dude, who knew three cords, covering Inner Circle. We left before he made it all the way through Sweat (A la la la long). Bob Marley, or even UB40, he was not.

We thought about just staying here another night, as it's only about three hours to our site at Fort Wilderness from here. But there is a pancake breakfast here tomorrow morning, and we don't want to get parked in. The Stuart Air Show is going on this weekend, and we also don't want to take any chances with traffic or road closures delaying our departure. In a few minutes, we will head to Orlando and hope our stealth parking spot is available for one night.

Photo by Thomas Hawk, used under a Creative Commons license.

Project Time

Today's title is a double-entendre: not only is this a time for doing projects, but also one of today's projects is, well, time. Which is to say, I set all the clocks, of which there are too many aboard Odyssey. In fact, there are no fewer than 15 clocks on the bus, and that does not count cell phones, watches, dive computers, and laptops.

Of course, like most everyone else, we need to change most of these clocks twice a year when Daylight Savings comes and goes. But we also routinely need to change almost all of them every time we cross a time zone boundary, which is an average of another eight times each year, for a whopping 150+ clock resets each year.

Having so many clocks means that whenever we change time zones or DST status, it's usually a day or two before I get to all of them, and today I knocked that item off the list. It's been on my mind since our cruise, where the fact that the US was still on DST while the rest of the world had already reverted to standard time meant we changed clocks four times on a seven day cruise, only to have to change yet again the day after we returned.

Most of the clocks are important in one way or another. For example, having the wrong time on the inverter control might mean the generator starting unexpectedly in the middle of the night, or during "quiet hours" someplace where it might matter. Having the wrong time on the engine data recorder would mean incorrect time stamps on fault codes. Yet few of these clocks are normally visible inside the bus, prompting some friends of ours to periodically remark that we have no clock, and to give us one as a gift. Since we also have no place to securely mount any other clocks, these end up kicking around the bus until they are lost or broken, at which point they give us another one, over my protests of having another mouth to feed, as it were.

For the curious (because I know someone will ask if I don't post it), these are some of the devices with clocks we have aboard:

• Inverter (Xantrex/Trace SW4024)
• Microwave (GE Advantium 120)
• Coffee maker
  
• Two programmable thermostats for heating and air conditioning
• Engine data recorder (Silverleaf VMS-200)
• Speedometer
• Dash radio
• Dashboard GPS
• Two bedside alarm clocks
• DirecTV receiver
• Sony television
• File Server
• Two scooters
• Portable GPS (used on the scooter or in rental cars)
  

Some of these don't really need to be set, per se, but only have the time zone changed. For example, the two GPS receivers always know what time it is, as does the DirecTV receiver. Some of the clocks I simply leave on Pacific Time continuously, as I do with the time setting on this blog and other web sites I frequent. But many of the clocks demand attention with every time change.

Speaking of changing clocks, one of my other projects today was replacing the power outlet for the coffee maker. Long-time readers may remember me saying that whenever we had a power glitch, such as the air compressor hard-starting while we are on a 15-amp service, that the clock on the old coffee maker would lose its mind and have to be power-cycled -- the darn thing would even quit in the middle of making a pot. That coffee maker was on its last legs and we replaced it a couple weeks ago with a different model.

Since then we've noticed that even the new one has had some clock-resets, and Louise finally traced it to a finicky receptacle. Moving the plug to the other socket on the same outlet improved things somewhat, but clearly there was a problem. Today I replaced the receptacle with a new one.

As long as I had the bad one in my hand, I decided to take it apart to do some failure analysis. What I found was that the U-shaped grip on the neutral side of one of the pair of outlets had fractured in two, and the plug was making minimal contact on only one surface with the half that remained, which could no longer "grip" the tang. It was clearly metal fatigue, but we generally don't unplug/plug the coffee maker in often -- perhaps we've done it a few dozen times in six years. It's possible the grip was scored by an off-angle plug insertion or removal at some point, and it is also possible that coach vibration contributed to the failure. Nevertheless, it's an early failure for this kind of thing, and it has prompted me to add a visual inspection of all receptacles aboard to my project list.

We have one more night here in Delray Beach before we head north, and I am hoping to get a few more items ticked off the list. If I can find the time...

Image by Alyssa L. Miller, used under a Creative Commons license.

Mouseward bound

We are parked at the Elks lodge in Delray Beach, Florida (map). We had a great, if all too brief, cruise to Grand Cayman, Roatan (Honduras), and Cozumel (Mexico) and enjoyed some great diving in the Caymans and Cozumel. The three ports were on successive days and we opted to take a break on Roatan rather than dive three days straight. The ship also stopped at Eleuthera in the Bahamas but we did not even disembark.

We arrived back at Port Everglades Saturday morning, and took our hosts out to dinner at their favorite Italian restaurant that evening. I had figured to get rolling Sunday morning, but Louise caught some kind of cold our last day at sea, and was really feeling too crummy to want to move yesterday. Instead I rode over with Steve to check out the most recent modifications to his Neoplan Spaceliner, including a repower to a Series-60 and B500 from the same powertrain we have in Odyssey. As part of the repower he also switched over to a glass dash, which is very whizzy.

We spent no time at all on our cruise thinking about plans for the interim period between our return and our next firm commitment, which is a trawler training cruise out of Vero Beach mid-January. Louise will be doing that with her friend Steph, leaving me a bachelor for a week. In any case, other than having a list of bus projects that can consume at least two weeks, and requiring some quiet downtime in a project-friendly spot, the intervening ten weeks is a blank slate, and so we spent a good deal of yesterday discussing possible plans.

One of the things we said we might do while we have some time to kill in Florida is to spend a few days at Fort Wilderness, the luxurious campground at Walt Disney World we've enjoyed in the past. Yesterday I finally got the chance to do the appropriate research, as we knew from previous experience that the rates swing wildly up and down throughout the holiday season. It turns out that this week and next week are the last two weeks of the "value season" -- the lowest rates of the year -- with a handful of weeks around the holidays being somewhat reasonable as well, and next year's value season beginning the week after New Years, but after the annual price increase.

After lining up the various rate windows at WDW with the other possible events we could put on the calendar, as well as the chart of average monthly temperatures and precipitation in Orlando, we decided to do Fort Wilderness next week, rather than later. While this means I won't get my two weeks of quiet downtime before we need to be there, it does maximize our chances for pleasant weather as well as minimizing our cost and the possibility of a schedule conflict. I made firm camp site reservations this morning, one of the very few times I have ever made reservations in six years of travel.

With a 15% discount code from MouseSavers.com, I was able to book a site for about $50 per night (plus tax), which is normally astronomical for us, but is an incredible deal at Disney. Considering that a stay at Fort Wilderness gets you the same perks as any other Disney resort, such as extra hours at the parks and access to the free transportation system, it's really the least expensive way to do Disney.

So we will be checking in there Sunday and will remain until Friday, which ought to be plenty of time to have a nice relaxing visit. We'll probably only visit the parks two or three of the four days we will be on site, but the transportation system will give us access to dining venues throughout the complex, and we'll have the scooters out as well, which can get us off-campus if need be.

Having set that as our destination, we decided to mosey slowly northward and set our sights here on the Delray Elks as our first stop, having found it to be a pleasant stop in the past. This morning we took on water and emptied our tanks, and got under way about mid-day. The lodge here is willing to let us stay till Friday (they have an event on Saturday), and I signed up for three nights. That should give Louise some time to recuperate, and I can make at least some progress on the ever-growing project list.

The West Palm Beach lodge, north of here, allows stays of two nights, and that can take us right up to Sunday morning if need be. That said, I'd like to find someplace closer to Orlando for Saturday night so I can pull a scooter out and go hunting for discounted park admission tickets, available from several retailers in the area.

We have no concrete plans beyond our week with the mouse, but I did put a few tentative items on the calendar. This will be the last year of the annual bus conversion rally in Arcadia over New Year's, and we will probably go to that to catch up with friends. Cruiser Expo in Stuart, which we attended last year, is the weekend before Louise's training cruise, and that's a good possibility as it will be close by. And we are giving some thought to doing the pre-event training the week before Trawler Fest. All of that would pretty much fill up January, leaving us just five weeks unspoken-for after Disney.

Those five weeks, of course, happen to include both the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. Neither of us has any family nearby, and I was unsuccessful in persuading my cousins to come down and meet us at Disney around the holidays, so we'll probably be looking for someplace to stay each time where we can get a holiday meal without any of the busy work. Last year we had great success at a casino for Thanksgiving, although that particular venue has since discontinued its RV parking, and we opted to go on a cruise over Christmas, which makes no sense this year having just returned from one.

The picture for after Trawler Fest, which again this year coincides with my birthday, has been even fuzzier than that for the preceding two months, but we learned today that our proposed panel for the South by Southwest conference has been accepted, and we are now committed to being in Austin, Texas in mid-March. That at least gives us a target and a timeline, and we will be leaving Florida for points west at the beginning of February.

Photo by Joe Shlabotnik, used under a Creative Commons license.