The next day we opted to bring her along to Hilton Head SC. She really seemed to enjoy the trip, we got to take her on the beach and for some nice walks. It wasn’t too hot, and by the trip back to Yemassee she was snoring away in the back seat.
The next morning it was time to say goodbye to South Point and continue on to Florida. Our goal was to get to St Augustine by lunchtime, which we missed by a couple of hours. We had initially planned to stay at a golf course 45 minute south of there, but upon our arrival discovered that there was an ‘overnight parking’ permit (not technically camping!) available in a large lot just outside the town centre, so we opted to spend the night. St Augustine is a great town to walk around, and we spent part of the next morning there as well.
On our way out of town we stopped at the St Augustine Alligator Farm for a couple of hours. It was a zoo with a focus on alligator species where they had breeds of alligators from different parts of the world. The feeding of the alligators was the most entertaining.
As we got closer to Orlando it was time to make a little detour to pick up Gareth’s motorcycle. It had been in storage at a friends place in a gated community in Winter Springs FL since October. We had packed a collapsible motorcycle trailer in the motorhome’s storage compartment prior to heading out but we wouldn’t use it just yet. After a short overnight stay in nearby Sanford and a visit to Blue Springs State Park where we saw manatees, we drove separately to our next stop, 10 nights at the Tropical Palms RV resort in Kissimmee FL.
We were both pretty impressed with Tropical Palms. While we didn’t have a full sewer hookup right at our site like we did at South Point, they came around once a week and emptied your gray and black water tanks using a little tanker truck. But the highlight of the resort had to be the pool, which we swam in pretty much daily. Tropical Palms is part of the Thousand Trails network also, so our entire 10 night stay here was included in our annual pass. If we’d paid full price that would have worked out to more than the cost of the entire pass for one year, so any future TT visits are icing on the cake.
Our main reason for visiting Tropical Palms however was it’s proximity to the Orlando theme parks, particularly Disney. After dropping an ungodly amount for a 4 day pass we were off the next morning on the motorcycle to Magic Kingdom. This probably turned out to be our least favorite day at the Disney parks as everything was packed and the lineups were huge everywhere. Our second day at Disney’s Animal Kingdom was much more enjoyable.
We opted to take a ‘day off’ after this, for Sandy to catch up on some work and to get some laundry and grocery shopping done.
