The Bunch Go To Florida

Since Orlando is so far from our house, we decided to do a stop over in Pensacola, FL, on both the way to and from Orlando. This proved to be a great half way stop. It took about 12 hours to get to our first campsite, Ft Pickens. This was with very minimal stops. The actual driving time was about 11 hours, which seemed like forever since we not only left at 2:30 am, but only pretty much had pine trees to stare at for several hours, who knew Florida had so many pine trees. Ft. Pickens was beautiful. The white sand looked like snow everywhere. We toured the naval aviation museum on the first stop over, and then toured Ft Pickens and played at the beach on the second stop over. The naval museum was really neat. It also allows the kids to touch pretty much everything so there was no worry about the kids getting fingerprints on everything. We spent the whole day there and were too tired to tour the lighthouse across the street or Ft Barrancas. We plan to visit them on our next trip though.

Ft Pickens

T next to statue at Naval Museum

T with a large weapon is scary!

Naval Museum had cute 1940's street set up.

The trip from Pensacola to our site at the Kissimee KOA took close to 9 hours. I listened to the kids work their way through most of the Harry Potter DVDs the entire way. God bless the car DVD player. I would have loved having that on car trips when I was little...my parents would have loved it too! :) It had apparently rained the day before our arrival and we were literally in a mud hole. We moved the table just to be able to use the concrete slab. I was afraid we would not be able to get the truck out in the morning, but we did and thankfully it did not rain anymore while we were there, though with the high humidity nothing ever dried out either! It was unusually hot while we were there. Highs were in the upper 80's with about 1000% humidity, while we were getting sunburns everyone at home was getting an unusual 5 inches of snow and some ice, which the ice is normal but it hardly ever snows real snow.

The KOA mudhole

Cheek to Cheek camping

Hogwarts Express

Lunch at Three Broomsticks

The Knight Bus...this guy was awesome!

Universal Studios was incredible. We bought a 3 day pass which worked out really well because we could leave late in the afternoon, when we were hot and our feet were about to fall off, without feeling like we would miss something. We picked a great time to go. The park was not super busy and the longest wait we had was about 25 minutes and most of the people stayed in Harry Potter's world so when we left that lines were about 5 minutes. Harry Potter's world was amazing! The attention to detail was insane. I really felt like I was in the movie. I thought it was so cool and I am not even that big of a fan. The only thing that upset me was I really wanted to do the Jurassic Park ride, but it was closed for 2 weeks for maintenance. I will tell you that about 90% of there rides are 3D motion stimulated and by day 3 I could not ride anymore for fear that I might get sick. May I never see another 3D ride for a LONG time!

Overall, we had a wonderful trip and I look forward to going back in a few years to do Disney. We liked Pensacola so much that I think that we will go their every couple of years.