I figured since we’ve already completed our second journey with our popup, I should probably fill you in on our first trip! 😉

We packed up the popup and the girls (ages 3 years 3 months and 6.5 months) and headed to Disney’s Fort Wilderness Campground May 4-6 for our inaugural family camping adventure. Everything having to do with the popup went smoothly, and it is something we will be doing as frequently as possible.

Anytime we’re out and about with the kids, my job is to keep them distracted or entertained as necessary while my husband runs around like a crazy man until we’re settled in. After I helped him back the popup into our site, I hopped back in the car, checked the status of the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse dvd and gave DD1 a snack. It took about a half hour to get the popup itself set up, and another half hour to get the awning, screen room, and “patio” setup.

Once the popup was up, I grabbed bedding and the “needed NOW” bag and made up the beds. Once that was done the girls came inside with me and watched Disney channel on the TV (yep, the TV. Altho most campgrounds do not have cable connection like Disney does.) while I tried to put the rest of our stuff away. For this trip, that wasn’t real successful, but now I have new ideas about how to proceed next time.

Take down went almost as smoothly as setup, altho the kids were a lot fussier in the process. I’m not sure if it took longer, or if they just weren’t in the mood to be strapped into carseats so early in the day, but there was a lot more of me running around the car to help each child and to double check things with the husband.

Now that I’ve given an overview on how the popup handled the weekend, let’s talk about how we humans DIDN’T handle the weekend.

We left on Friday, and the first issue started with DD1 the Friday before. Yet another stomach bug. Then, the Tuesday prior I had a stomachache so bad that I had to have my husband come home from work early to help take care of the kids. My stomach issues continued for a full week, and later I realized DD1 had been kind enough to share her stomach bug with me. So that’s 2 of 4 who aren’t feeling so hot before we even got to Friday. Then, Friday morning while DD1 was in preschool, DD2 decides to go from this slight sniffle to full blown head congestion and a horrible swollen eye. So a trip to the pediatrician was in order before we could leave town. Then, once everything was set up Friday and we’d had some time to play around on Saturday, we took our annual passes over to Magic Kingdom and tried to have some fun at the parks. But my husband aggravated an old knee injury and DD2 just could not get cool in the heat, so we returned to the popup.

We cooked our first meal inside and generally had a great time just enjoying the newness of it all. Fort Wilderness is a fantastic campground with enough activities to occupy the whole family for a week without ever setting foot in a Disney park. While we do not yet have a return date set, we WILL be camping at Fort Wilderness again.

One last note… I’d love to include pictures from this weekend, but apparently the stomach bug was so distracting that there aren’t many and the few that there are just don’t go with this post. Hopefully this won’t be the case when I get around to posting about trip #2!

**Disclaimer: I received nothing for talking about Disney in this post. We spend a lot of time and money there and I hope that my ramblings here will help others plan vacations there.**