Happiest Place on Earth?
NP Roadtrip – Florida Atlantic Coast & Disney World – Days 70 – 73
Like I have said before, I have only ever been to the Miami airport and the cruise terminal. I’ve never been anywhere else in Florida. I inspected the map for this section of the trip to see what we could do on our way to Orlando. Low and behold Palm Beach is “almost” on the way. G really really super duper loves these “almost” on the way spots that I want to see. Haha! It’s actually not that I wanted to see Palm Beach, it’s that I wanted to see The Breakers. This famous pink Flagler hotel with the iconic palm tree lined driveway, is also a National Historic Landmark. I absolutely needed to see it, and we were going, no matter the effort. It took me a little while to realize that Palm Beach is also home to another very famous hotel, Mar-a-Lago, or what we now refer to as, The Weekend White House.
The most logical way to go onto Palm Beach is the Ocean Drive route that takes you past Mar-a-Lago and leads over to The Breakers. We noticed there was a little traffic, and some street closure signs, but continued on the route because all the streets were open and not one person or sign said to do any different. There were cones set up along the street, hundreds and hundreds of police officers, official black cars, police dogs, etc. literally everywhere. A quick look at the news revealed that the Chinese President had been meeting with the President at Mar-a-Lago and was at the airport ready to leave Palm Beach. He was already gone, but the road to The Breakers was still closed, which forced us to drive about 15 miles out of our way in the opposite direction, causing a near 45 minute route delay. You can’t exactly do a u-turn in a trailer on a 2 lane road so we didn’t really have any choice. This detour took us by some of the most amazing homes I’ve ever seen in my life. Wow! Yet, the view was marred still by HUNDREDS of police outside of the general Mar-a-Lago area. One beach park’s parking lot was filled with police cars and that was about 8-9 miles from Mar-a-Lago. I could not believe how many police were there. It was the biggest drain on resources I’ve seen in a very long time. But wait, there’s more! While driving this detour, we read about Mar-a-Lago, it’s history, and it’s famous owner’s long standing feud with the local airport. He has sued the city of Palm Beach numerous times about flight paths, emissions, etc. In fact, the last of these claims was filed in November 2015, but dropped after he won the presidency. Why? Because a no-fly zone over Mar-a-Lago and surrounding areas was imposed by the FAA. Game, set, match.
Murph sniffing out some government waste across Lake Worth Lagoon.
Honestly though, this whole detour was worth it, just so we could see the look on the face of the sweet young man greeting guests at the driveway of The Breakers. Priceless. After taking a wrong turn (following the not-so-reliable BMW navigation system) leading us onto a one way street with 3 short gated driveways of multi-millionaire homes armed with cameras, G got us out of there “like a BOSS” in less than 60 seconds and down the palm lined driveway at The Breakers. We are greeted with a smile by the aforementioned young man. G jokingly said, “I think we’re lost!”, and the young man quipped, “well you aren’t if you are either hungry or thirsty.” Good on him! I exclaimed that we were both hungry and thirsty, but we weren’t sure if there was trailer parking. Yep, this was our exact conversation. I asked this guy, who works for a hotel that charges $450 a night for a room, if they had TRAILER parking. He was so sweet and basically said that he wasn’t sure if we were ok with a valet person driving our car with trailer, but that they might have room for us in valet. He also said that we could maybe pull into valet ourselves. I mean, come ON! The customer service this guy had was incredible. We didn’t want to burden them so G asked if it was ok if we just drove down the driveway to allow me to take a picture of the trailer with the beautiful view in the background. He looked relieved and said no problem. This is about the time that the A-hole behind us laid on the horn a few 20 times trying to get us to move out of the way. So…while I got out of the car, camera in hand, G slowly pulled down the driveway at about 3 miles per hour while “waving” at “Horn Blower” as he passed angrily on the right. Passive aggressiveness is a trait that unites G and I over and over again. Let our romance be a forever burning flame!
Both G and I have lived on the West Coast for all our lives (except for my brief stint in Indiana for college). If we were going to Disney-anything, we were going to Disneyland. One place both of us have always wanted to go was Epcot. When planning this section of our trip, I thought we would only go to one park and stay in the area for 3 nights. We would go to Epcot on one day and the Kennedy Space Center the other day. Upon further inspection of the map and looking at the times, we were able to go to the Kennedy Space Center after leaving Orlando (on our travel day) and do another park day on the second day. We made all our campsite bookings and only then did we look at the prices for the parks. For 2 adults to do 2 days of park hopper passes, it came to the grand total of $551.68. This amount, on average, would cover 14 nights of accommodations for us! But again, this is another one of those places (like The Breakers) that I just needed to see. And I wanted to see Epcot most of all.
Funny, but G and I always thought that the entire Epcot Center park was located in the silver dome. The one you see in all the pictures. Said dome is about the size of 2 Walgreens stacked on top of each other, so I’m really happy they don’t try to stuff 30,000 average daily visitors in there. Once we got past the shock and disappointment of the park being outside of the dome (just kidding), we went to explore. We had gotten a few Fast Pass appointments, but weren’t really savvy on how to use them until the next day. We had a great time checking out some rides, but enjoyed sharing a drink in every country most of all, which is something my older and wiser sister and brother-in-law suggested we do. I’m sad that I didn’t know that all the food kiosk items in the park were small dishes, so we could have also eaten in every country, but oh well. We walked about 8 miles that first day, which was enough for us. We left the park before dark and ate dinner back at the trailer.
The following morning, we had some Fast Passes over at the Magic Kingdom, so we hit those, along with a few other rides. Our favorites continue to be those where you compete against one another by shooting at targets along the ride path. We went on Buzz Lightyear 3 times that day and Toy Story twice at Hollywood Studios. Did I mention we REALLY like those kinds rides, even though I lose every single time!?!? I also have to say that we had great meals at both the Jungle Navigation Co. in Magic Kingdom and the 50s Prime Time Café at Hollywood Studios. We were relieved after our not-so-great lunch experience in China at Epcot the day prior. We ended up coming home in the middle of the day for about an hour and a half to let the dogs run and hang out and to also rest our feet. Coming home for a time-out is the way to go, for sure. It certainly makes it easier to get through a longer day. We went to Hollywood Studios for the second part of the day, and we were even able to make it back to Magic Kingdom to see the fireworks and the Once Upon a Time Castle Projection Show (which was absolutely amazing BTW). No matter how tired we were, I managed to have a great time, which is a testament to Disney and their ability to impress even the most hardened mind!
The next day we packed up and made our way up the Atlantic Coast. We stopped at Kennedy Space Center for about an hour. Disney sucked the life blood out of us, so the poor Kennedy Space Center suffered the consequences. On a better day, I imagine it would have taken us 2-3 hours to get through everything we wanted to see there, but we were so exhausted. If you only have a short amount of time, though, you have to at least see the Atlantis expedition (ah-maze-ing) and also Heroes and Legends. Fyi – the space center also has free boarding for your dogs if it’s too hot outside, which is very convenient. We decided to board our dogs, because it was about 70 degrees outside.
These pictures below highlight just a few things I found fascinating at the Kennedy Space Center that directly relate to some experiences we have in our trailer and on this trip. The picture on the left shows what an average campfire's temperature measures after 3 hours of burning. What I neglected to get a picture of was the complete other end of the spectrum that shows what the rocket engine temperature measures. Of course for the life of me I cannot find a picture of this exhibit online, but just know that their graphic really drove the point home as to how hot the engines run on a spaceship! The middle picture is the shuttle's bathroom. Note the vaccum looking contraption on the right. Yeah. No matter how small our trailer's bathroom is, it's definitely better than what those astronauts have to deal with. Which leads us to our last picture on the far right, the sleeping chambers. This is precisely why I love our Safari Alto. Wow! I have a luxurious king size bed with memory foam topper and a comfy down comforter to come home to each night after exploring. This "bed" looks like a public shower stall. Just sayin'.
By the time we left Kennedy, we were getting a little bit hungry, but I still had one more must see on “The List”. I have grown to love the National Seashores, just during this trip. We absolutely loved Point Reyes and Gulf Islands, so it was only natural for us to check out Canaveral National Seashore (CNS) while we were in the area. I’ve referenced the BMW navigation being somewhat unreliable, and when we were going to CNS, apparently we could have gone a more direct route from Kennedy Space Center, but BMW routed us all the way around through New Smyrna Beach. I’m so glad it did, though, because by taking that route we actually got to check out a fantastic lunch spot. We ended up at Yellow Dog Eats in New Smyrna Beach. Dog Friendly. Casual. Great Service. Great Food. Enough said. We left there with huge smiles and a big bottle of “Fish’s Gold BBQ Sauce”. Oh, and the seashore is really beautiful, though there were more things to see (that we missed due to the BMW navi system) that we hear are really amazing as well (like manatees and turtles).
That night we stayed at Faver Dykes State Park, just South of St. Augustine, which I would highly recommend. The sites are wide and private, though we had plenty of visitors being close to the restrooms. That’s ok, though, we still like to show our Alto off. After a quick trip to the local market, we built a fire and started to prepare dinner. We had gotten some flounder at a seafood market and it had been renting space in the freezer for far too long. Tonight was the night we were going to cook it, I just had to figure out how. Faver Dykes has extremely spotty cell service. I had looked up a recipe earlier in the day, but by the time we got to the campsite, it had wiped from my phone (which is highly irritating, but oh well, technology is not my thing). I decided to make Pan Fried Flounder with Yellow Bell Pepper Relish and Mashed Sweet Potatoes. You can access my on-the-fly recipe here: http://www.campbuymelove.com/recipes/2017/5/15/sauteed-flounder-with-yellow-bell-pepper-relish-and-sweet-potato-mash
Holy cow dinner was amazing, however, we were interrupted by a freaking Armadillo that was sniffing his way through our campsite. It was so dark and quick that I couldn’t get a good picture of him, but, I did get a good video of the sound he makes as he rifles through the brush, looking for food. We finished dinner and tried to enjoy the fire, but I couldn’t stop looking for creatures (we also had a racoon 10 feet from me the same night). We decided to retire inside or our neighbors might have started to get annoyed that I kept shining our bright-as-the-sun flashlight in their direction looking for campsite invaders.
We just had two more sites to see before leaving Florida for good, Fort Matanzas and Castillo de San Marcos. Both are within 30 minutes of Faver Dykes so it’s a really convenient spot to camp. Sadly, we couldn’t take the ferry over to Fort Matanzas because of damage from Hurricane Matthew in October 2016, but you can see it from the visitor center and we chatted with the rangers for a bit about the site and damage. Castillo de San Marcos was open so we ventured over there to have a look. RV parking is tricky and a little bit of a walk from the fort itself, however, dogs are allowed everywhere except in the fort building itself, so that made it easier. I went in and looked around while G walked the dogs outside, and then G walked in the fort while I walked the dogs. This method takes longer, but it beats leaving the dogs in the car or not seeing the fort at all. Once we both saw enough of the fort, we strolled through old town St. Augustine a bit, grabbed a few teas, then headed out. And that, folks, is how our Florida chapter closed. We were in Florida (or at least our trailer was) for 22 nights, and leaving there marked our “official” trek North. While Florida treated us very well and offered many NPS sites to take in, it was time to say goodbye to the beaches, the mosquitoes, and the crazy drivers.
