Saturday, April 21, 2012

Thousand Trails Orlando Park

As one of our exploratory trips around the Orlando area, we stopped to check out the Thousand Trails park there. Reviews can be found at rvparkreviews.com, but we'll just add our two cents worth. It's a great park....huge....Over 800 sites. We got a day pass and drove throughout the park. It was extremely brown and dried out. They are really needing some rain. There was a nice clubhouse, a campstore in the clubhouse, and an on site little restaurant.

one of the TT pools
We liked the layout of the park, there's some shade available, but not a lot. It looked clean and the sites looked reasonably spaced. There are two pools, one for the adults, one for the kiddies....The only bad thing about the pools is there is ZERO shade, no umbrellas, no protection from the sun. Sparky would not use the pool much because of that, but she DOES love the lakes and the boats. Heck, she could even put her kayak in and paddle around a bit.

Many of the sites are 30 amp only, but there were plenty of 50 amp sites available as well...NO cable TV. There are two non-swimming lakes because of alligators. You can use one of the park's rowboats to go out and row around the lake if you want to. Sparky LOVES rowing a boat!

They have weekly travelogues at that park, and other activities as well...Some of our blogging friends have stayed there and really loved it. I hope they will report in and add some extra comments about this park. We did notice that the sites are somewhat typical for older Thousand Trails parks...uneven and not in very good shape. There is a newer section, section "I", but even those sites were not concrete, they were gravel and had significant sloping sides on many of them.

The coolest thing we saw today, was a pair of sandhill cranes with their "baby", who looks more like a teenager.

If you've been following our blog, you've seen the sandhill crane photos of tiny little babies with their parents, in our blog from just a few weeks ago. Here, you can see the babies as they have gotten a little older.

I have no idea how old this sandhill crane is with its parents, but it's getting closer to an adult age, with some more mature feathers coming in in the color range of the adult.

He or she, even ruffled the feathers as I got a little closer...The parents and the little one really were very comfortable and not threatened by my presence. I talked to them while I took my photos, and hopefully, I sounded non-threatening and soothing to them....It was a thrill for me to see this more mature baby sandhill crane, after seeing the really little ones back in Port St. Lucie a few weeks ago.....You can see the graying feathers coming in signifying more maturity in this young bird. I LOVE the cranes! I've yet to see the mating dance, but there's a blog coming up with a flamingo mating dance...Stay tuned for the Disney blog on Animal Kingdom!
We would definitely stay at this Thousand Trails park in the future...See you later!

5 comments:

  1. Those sites look terrible! Can't imagine TT letting them get so bad. You will need plenty of leveing blocks.

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  2. Mark, from Phaeton Place, was at TT Orlando earlier in the season and he had some pictures of the youngster. It sure has grown considerably since then. Sounds like you settled on the Animal Kingdom as your Disney Park. Good choice. Do the truck safari early in the morning; that's when we've seen the most animals out in the open. Of course, there's nothing from stopping you repeating the ride later in the day since there's no extra charge for it. Like the other Disney Parks, I think they have a parade sometime during the day that is fun to watch.

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  3. Great crane pictures! It's been so long since I've been to Disneyworld I don't think there even was an "animal kingdom". Just Epcot and the Magic Kingdom from what I remember.

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  4. Park looks nice but the uneven site "pads/non-pads" are really a turn-off aren't they?
    Love your sandhill crane photos and descriptions - fascinating birds.
    Safe travels

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  5. TT Orlando needs lots of work but they are making significant progress. We stayed there 3-4 times this past winter and never saw a lawn mower in use once. Of course the grass doesn't grow much either unless it is watered regularly.

    The young sandhill crane has really grown since we left Orlando. Here is a shot I took just last month. Initially, there were four chicks but apparently, hawks took three of the youngsters soon after they were born. Glad to see this last one is doing so well.

    http://smu.gs/IAsAyn

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