Moving day

Wednesday was moving day from Clerbrook Golf and RV Resort to Thousand Trails Orlando (TTO) RV Resort. The checkout time for Clerbrook was 11am, we had only about a half hour drive to our next campground with a noon check-in, so we endeavored to leave as close to 11am as possible. We were a little concerned about getting Gracie out of our site... when we got there, we had put the drive wheels of Gracie on our rubber pads to ensure that they did not go down into the grass/mud. It had not dried much while we were there. The fellow in the site next to us was also leaving with his 5th wheel on Wednesday - his back drive wheels on his pickup started slipping and he put it into 4-wheel-drive and got out okay. But, Gracie doesn't have 4 wheel drive... we put additional rubber pads down in front of the drive wheels so we hoped Gracie would get going and not slipping. We decided to pull pretty close to straight out onto an asphalt street that was in front of our site so we would not need to stop or maneuver while we were still on the grass. It turned out that Gracie pulled out just fine, no slipping, we got onto the asphalt and then re-positioned on the asphalt to head toward the exit, hooked up the Jeep, and headed out.

We had heard that TTO was very particular about not letting anyone enter until 12 noon or after, that they would turn rigs away from the entrance. We had been told of a place where people "staged" up the highway from the campground -- I drove slowly, catching as many lights as I could, taking about 45 minutes to make the half hour drive, and got to the offsite staging area. There were a few other rigs there, and after negotiating our way around the tight parking lot, we joined the line up to enter TTO.

We had also heard that they were very effective at processing the rigs coming in - thankfully, they have a long entry driveway - maybe 10-15 rigs can fit in the entry driveway - others are lined up along the highway in front. One other Thousand Trails member reported that he watched 59 rigs came in on December 14 in one hour.

We had disconnected at the offsite staging area to enable us to get around in the parking area...

... so I was driving separately in the Jeep as we got into the campground. I took this picture when Gracie was in the "inside-the-campground" staging area, where they provided you with information about what campsites might be available, and then escorted you to a site. The golf cart next to Gracie was prepared to escort Carl to a site in the new section with concrete pads.

Other rigs in the inside-the-campground staging area -- about 5-6 rigs can fit into this area at a time - they efficiently move them in, give them their arrival number (we were #16), determine which section they want, and then escort them out.

We were impressed -- we were on our site by 12:30pm.

Nice new sites just recently put in. In fact, the printed map doesn't even have these sites.

The satellite view from Google Maps shows that this area (a little south of where Carl's picture is showing) used to be where a storage lot for RVs was located. (Link to Google maps)

There seem to be a lot of activities here, and we're looking forward to participating!