Our first vacation anywhere as a young couple was to Walt Disney World in 1988. Since then we’ve been many times, both before children and then with our son. But there was one Disney experience we’d never been able to enjoy.
On our previous Disney World vacations we’d always flown. It just wasn’t practical to drive being from the west coast. A two-week vacation from California to Florida and back would have mostly just spent driving with little time to enjoy the resort.
This year we decided to take a vacation to Disney World unlike any we’d had before. Now that we are not working we decided to make our dream a reality and drive to Disney World. After a week with our kids and granddaughter at the Disneyland Resort in California, we headed east. After our trek through the desert and around the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, we arrived in Orlando.
During most of our previous trips we had stayed at Disney’s Wilderness Lodge. We love the outdoors, and this resort was built in the architectural style of the great lodges of our National Parks. But this trip would have another big difference. Instead of staying at our favorite resort we were going to do something we’d always wanted to do, stay at Disney’s Fort Wilderness Campground. It was the best of both worlds for us.
In the last 25 years we’ve camped in 20 states at hundreds of campgrounds, but Fort Wilderness is unlike any we’d camped. With 800 campsites and 400 cabins it is absolutely massive. It’s a resort unto itself with pools, tennis courts, horse riding, and two trading posts. There is bus service inside the campground that will take you anywhere at the Disney Resort. Fort Wilderness even has it’s own dinner theater, the Hoop-De-Doo Musical Revue.
We opted for a 10-day stay. We have the time since I’m not working. And I wanted to make the trip relaxing. We’re not as young as we once were and a day at a Disney park is a lot of walking. It’s been 37 years since our first visit. So it was nice being able to take a break between park days. In five days we visited all the parks. Ever night was spent at Epcot, our favorite park.
On our off-days we explored the entire resort. We rode busses, boats, monorails and even the new Sky Liner. We visited all of the hotels, explored trails, browsed through the shops and found a few things to mail home to our granddaughter. We rented bikes and a kayak. We also enjoyed dining out. A tradition for us is dinner at the Geyser Point Grill at the Wilderness Lodge. An outdoor restaurant along the shores of Bay Lake.
The most we typically spend for a camp site is under $40 per night. Every couple of weeks we’ll spend a night at a KOA Kampground at around $80 so we can do laundry. So, at $225 per night this was the most expensive campground we’d ever been to. But staying on Disney property has several benefits.
We don’t have to pay for parking or wait in traffic. We get early access to the parks. And of course we are immersed in the Disney magic. Plus free admission to the Blizzard Beach water park on our check-in day. We even got Resort TV by plugging in our cable. But for us the biggest benefit is convenience. Within a few minutes walk from our camp site we can board a Disney bus or water taxi to whisk us off to one of the parks. It’s especially nice because we had to come back a couple of times each day to feed and walk our dog.
One nice thing about camping in an RV is that you’ve got your whole kitchen with you wherever you go. So, we loaded up on groceries before we arrived and ate breakfast and most of our meals in the RV. We could also load our packs every day with granola bars and snacks from Costco. This saved us a lot.
Though we tend to try to save money, we did enjoy several of the restaurants on Disney property. This included a couple of favorites for us. Like getting a burger at the Sci-Fi Diner at Hollywood Studios, a drive-in movie theater themed restaurant. And we could not pass up the Fish and Chips at the Harbor House in the Magic Kingdom. We were on vacation afterall. But we only spent $250 on dining in 10 days. This included our new favorite restaurant, the Trails End BBQ at Fort Wilderness Campground.
To make sure we could get a spot I made our reservation 6-months in advance. I booked the campground direct with Disney which was $2,343 for 10 days. I did find a deal at Undercover Tourist where I paid $1,518 for our 5-Day Park Hopper tickets. This was a $189 savings from the rack-rate. Plus $150 for groceries and $250 for dining, and another $250 for souvenirs and rentals. The total cost was $4,511.
It was a great trip. And even though it is the cheapest way to stay on Disney property, for us as full-time RV campers, it’s hard to justify $225 a night for a campground. Plus it was a long drive from the west coast. I don’t think this is something that we would do every year. But when we told our granddaughter that we took her daddy to Disney World for the first time when he was four she got very excited, because she will be four soon. So it looks like we’ll be back next year!