One of the reasons we keep coming back to Ft. Wilderness is that there is so much to do here without even going into any of the theme parks.  And you don’t have to drive anywhere if you don’t want to – there’s always the boat, monorail, buses (all free), bicycling or just plain hoofing it.  Or like so many other people do, you can rent or bring a golf cart.  Although, Disney has yet to expand their monorail system to include the local WalMart!

Weather has been great since we have been here, maybe even a little too hot for us with temperatures in the mid-80’s, about 10 degrees higher than normal.  The local weathermen have said that these temps are typical of what they have in May, not in December.  Even though it has been a tad too warm, at least the humidity has been at an acceptable level. Oh yeah, I can hear the cries of sympathy from all of you in the snow belt!

So each day since we have been here, we’ve been exploring – traveling by boat and by monorail to the resorts to see the Christmas decorations, biking around the campground and over to Wilderness Lodge and taking long walks. Not going into a lot of hour by hour details, I’ll just let the photos below do the “talking”.

On Tuesday night, we walked down to the marina/beach area to watch the Magic Kingdom fireworks followed by the Electrical Water Pageant.  This may sound familiar to some of you since we had a post about this from our 2012 trip to Disney. Always a great show!

On Wednesday, December 4th, our friends, Jim and Ann came to visit us for lunch.   We’ve known Jim and Ann for years now, our former neighbors at our Mt. Washington Place condo in Bretton Woods, NH since 1996.  We sold that condo in 2006 and after that never got to see them much during the summer, even though it was only a 3 hour trip from our Norton house. On the other hand, our trips south have always panned out for a rendezvous!

Just about the time we sold our Norton house this past October, they sold their NH condo and are currently building a new home in southern NH so they can be close to their daughter, son-in-law and beautiful 2 year granddaughter in MA.  They also have a lovely home in Vero Beach, FL.  The last time we saw them was in 2012 when they came to visit us here and we went to the Grand Floridian Cafe.  This time we decided to have lunch at the Kona Cafe at the Polynesian Resort.  Good meal!  After lunch, we went to the Grand Floridian and the Wilderness Lodge so they could see all of the Christmas decorations.  Fun day but we all were pretty pooped by the time we got back to the coach.

One thing I found to be extremely interesting; when Rob and I visited the Grand Floridian on Tuesday, the borders along the walkway were bright red with rows and rows of coleus.  When we went back there with Jim and Ann, all of the coleus had been removed and the borders were now planted with geraniums.  There were hundreds of them!  All of this must be done in the wee hours of the night because you never see anyone outside during the day working on the gardens.

Here are more photos from our first few days at Disney: