Ok I’ve slept on it and spent a few hours pouring over maps, reviews and my list of shots I prepared at home. Most, if not all of what I was looking for was within an hour drive of Orlando, so as I was knackered by this point it made more sense to stay in Kissimmee and take short trips than try to find accommodation en route for another 4 or 5 days of driving. I was getting used to the heat and could get more done per day and then of course there was the old
‘the kids would love you to stay for another 4 days’.
Sucker!
All my friends know that no matter what they ask if they preface it with ‘the kids would love it if you’ and they could follow it up with ‘put your hand in the fire’ then I’ll probably do what they ask. Still it would be good to see their faces in Disney and as they are quite young, by the time they get themselves together in the morning its about 11am and I’ll have half a days work done then, they nap in the afternoon and are in bed by 7. Yes to those of you that know me I did say that I’d have half a days work done by 11am, instead of my usual at home dragging my sorry ass up out of bed by 11!
I’m not a morning person… unless of course Im on a trip and that would be wasting daylight hours when I could be taking photos that make me money.
Now if only I could apply myself to the dull flat gray sky summer days here when its usually raining and I’d be a millionaire (or locked up).
As well as getting some background shots for the upcoming election, I wanted to get some evidence of the recession here in Florida (without getting myself shot). Florida is one of the areas hit hardest with a lot of foreclosures etc. You didn’t have to stray too far to see foreclosure listings, bank owned properties, empty strip malls and empty hotels. No real difference to back home then and whilst it did seem a hell of a lot emptier than the last time I was here, I was here at the height of the boom in the middle of summer as opposed to on a long tail recession at the end of September.
The difference was stark though and talking to friends who have been back regularly this is better than it has been for a number of years and like back home this might take years to recover, if it ever does. Like home, the problem is all these buildings require maintenance and money and in this climate they will degrade rapidly and may never recover. Like home, the people will move away to find work and may never recover or it may take a generation to recover.
After all the doom and gloom photos I met up with my friends and we went to one of the tackiest tourist attractions I have ever heard of and believe me I’ve been to a few! Gatorland is a theme pack comprised of well, gators, and allows you to get as close as you really want to come to these monsters.
If you can see past the tacky entrance and go into full tourist mode it isn’t a bad place to visit, it wasn’t busy by its standards apparently but it was busy enough to breathe a bit of life into the place. I hadn’t seen anywhere this busy since leaving the Miami Dolphins game over a week ago. Other than watching the alligators, crocodiles and other such things it was interesting to people watch the type of people who go to Gatorland! They were probably saying the same about us.
I’d never heard a pissed off alligator hiss a warning before and now I know what it sounds like, I really don’t want to hear it again in real life. After mistaking a rattlesnake rattle as a plastic bag caught on a fence, I’ll not mistake that sound for anything other than a serious warning.
One of the other ‘must see’ places Id missed on my previous trip was the town of Celebration. It was originally planned and designed by Disney and you can tell. It is one of those idealistic villages with the white picket fences, manicured lawns and hardly a thing out of place. I was told it reminded people of the Stepford Wives in that its an easy place to point and mock but every single person I asked said they would love to live there! Yes moving in out of sarcasm can only go so far.
I have to admit walking and driving round Celebration with a fair degree of scepticism and firmly with the ‘Stepford Wives’ frame of mind but after parking up downtown and going for something to eat I noticed no chains and there was a beautiful wee farmers market on the day I was there. I spent some time in the market and stocked up on some fresh local fruit for the next couple of days. It was the first time since I arrived that I had tasted real fruit with real taste, sticky oranges full of juice and full of pips that I couldn’t get enough of.
I was about to leave and it was around lunchtime so rather than head out onto 192 and visit some chain place that would just be serving the usual crap I called into one of the local coffee shops in Celebration. What a find! They were baking on site and the coffee was real coffee! So I just had to try their strawberry cheesecake and strong coffee.
So yes, I’m a convert, if you want away from the hussle, hassle and bustle of Orlando/Kissimmee then get down to Celebration for an afternoon stroll and if you can time it for the market day then all the better.
One of the previous haunts was Old Town which doing the research for the trip isn’t the old town I had thought when I was first there. Oh how young and innocent and gullible I was back then!
It doesn’t have quite the same aura during the day with nobody about but well worth the trip in the evening but park somewhere and walk to it.
The radio station was one I listened to a lot on my previous visit and I was sorry to miss the classic car cruise this time
During my last trip Id spent most of the time in Kissimmee so it was good to drive up and down some of the old haunts and I even had time to call into Orange World and buy some fresh orange juice. When in Rome and all that. The Orange World store is one of those places you only seem to get in the USA, completely mad but seemingly fitting! Its half an orange and its really orange, its one of those places you don’t really need directions to!
The flea market isn’t quite the place I remember and its confession time I’m afraid. The last time I was here I was here with my girlfriend at the time. We spent most of the 2 weeks doing the disney thing, universal, busch gardens and a trip to the Kennedy Space Center. We brought home more clothes than we left with and I still am wearing some of them today, some 17 years on. That’s not really the confession. On our last day we had some time to kill between checking out and going to the airport so we went to the 192 flea market to kill a few hours and spend the rest of the dollars. We had lunch and noticed the ‘light’ beers for sale so thought we’d have one each with our lunch. The concept of low alcohol beer at the time was being breached back home in Ireland and there might have been one on the market but probably not if we both tried it to see what it was like. My girlfriend didn’t like hers so I drank the rest of it. After all it was low alcohol and only a 20 min drive to the airport. Well we weren’t au fait with the low alcohol concept, we certainly had never heard of the low calorie high alcohol version. It was only when I got up to go to the car and went outside in the heat and started to sweat that I noticed I was getting a bit dizzy. Of course the initial blame was on the lunch and then it suddenly dawned on me that downing 2 pints in less than 30 mins and then walking out into near 40C heat probably wasn’t the greatest idea I ever had. With only an hour to get to the airport and my girlfriend not on the rental car insurance and not being the most forgiving of people I decided to keep my mouth shut and chance it. Im sure the statue of limitation is up now and I’ll not be appearing in Guantanamo bay orange any time soon but a lesson learned.
I went past the old hotel we stayed at and I was glad I didn’t think to ring them as even my 19 dollars plus 10 dollars resort fee plus tax plus occupancy plus hotel room was a step up from this one. One of my other memories from the last trip was leaving for Disney in the morning with only 2 cars in the car park to return to it completely bunged with every size and shape of vehicle with pickup trucks full of stuff (yes included a rocking chair). Wondering if it was a holiday or something we turned on the TV in the room to see that they really do take their coastal hurricane warnings seriously!
The last time I was here was the first time Id ever been in a helicopter. We took a flight up over the whole area and had a good look at Disney in twilight. It was another valuable lesson as I bought one of those t-shirts with a discrete logo on the chest only to open it up when I got home to find a feck off huge big helicopter thing on the back of the shirt plus their telephone number right across my kidneys. Err, no. Not even for painting the house. I think it ended up in a charity shop somewhere and some kid in Africa got it instead of a barcelona, real madrid or arsenal football shirt.
I passed on the opportunity this time and was proud I managed to hold back!
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