Orlando – Off The Beaten Path: Discovering Central Florida Without
Orlando – Off The Beaten Path: Discovering Central Florida Without Visiting Any Theme Parks… Can It Be Done?
One of my husband’s everyday places is Florida, considering he's an avid golfer and likes to escape from the bloodless Canadian winter for his birthday in early December.
For a while now we had planned to discuss with Orlando, however neither one people are into subject parks. So there has been the crisis for me: could we be able to visit Orlando without placing foot into Disney or Universal Studios? For a person as curious as me this changed into a right project and I were doing weeks of searches on the Internet and communicating with the Orlando Convention and Visitors Bureau to find out approximately attention-grabbing destinations off the beaten course.
Well, I am blissful to mention, we arrived to come back accurately yesterday from our go back and forth, and the journey itself used to be really an journey due to the fact we made up our minds to power from Toronto to Orlando, approximately 2100 km each one approach! Actually, the pressure was no longer as painful as I predicted. The force by Pennsylvania and West Virginia become positive and hilly, and I really enjoyed coming over the ridge of the Appalachians, good wherein Virginia and North Carolina meet, where you get a beautiful view of the piedmont cabo san lucas yacht rentals vicinity round Winston-Salem that spreads out in opposition to the Atlantic in front of the mountain chain.
And I am even happier to say that inside the 14 or so days that we spent in Orlando, now not handiest did we get to play a whole lot of golf (to make my husband in reality satisfied…;) – along with Mystic Dunes, Champions Gate, Royal St. Cloud Links, Hawk’s Landing and Timacuan Golf and Country Club, no longer to say the Walking Hall of Fame revel in of the PGA Father Son Challenge at Champions Gate, yet I also acquired to explore some pretty enjoyable locations, destinations I would now not have anticipated in Orlando and its surrounding area. I also had a risk to do an interview with GolfOrlando to get a much greater proposal of why Orlando is generally known as “The Ultimate Golf Theme Park”.
We all started off our first week with a consult with to the Orange Country Regional History Center, which gave us a proper historic heritage of Orlando and Central Florida. Then, for a few sociological and cultural insights, we visited the Well’s Built Museum for African American History and Culture in Orlando. To higher off our first day of exploration we enjoyed a walk round picturesque Lake Eola in downtown Orlando.
The subsequent item on my off-the-crushed trail time table became a discovery of the City of Winter Park, a wonderful suburb of Orlando, such as Old European cities. I also went on the Winter Park Scenic Boat Tour, which used to be an enjoyable, informative and visually captivating tour.
The adrenaline revved up appreciably on our subsequent trip: a completely high-speed airboat trip at Boggy Creek, that was once observed up by means of a miles reduce velocity swamp buggy journey in a customized-developed monster truck that took us thru legit Florida panorama.
After our golf day trip at the Royal St. Cloud Golf Links we loved a exquisite picnic by way of the waterfront in sunny downtown Kissimmee. Then, on a exquisite Sunday morning we drove about an hour external of Orlando to attain the quaint the city of Mt. Dora, the place I hopped at the “Herbie Express”, a part of the Mt. Dora – Lake Eustis Scenic Railway.
From midweek within the moment week onwards the climate took a flip for the worse. While planes had been sliding off runways in Chicago and checklist temperatures were registered in the mid-western states, we had been freezing in Florida in which the mercury hovered around sixty eight to 70 degrees Fahrenheit (round 20 ranges Celsius). So I bought a rain jacket, and discovered no longer to let the freezing cold intervene with our plans, we headed out to maintain our explorations.
On a day that used to be forecast to be rainy, however simply ended up being a section grey and clammy, we went out to stumble on Loch Haven Park, Orlando’s middle of science, art and lifestyle. We then endured our explorations additional south to observe some of Orlando’s historical neighbourhoods and parks corresponding to Lake Cherokee and Lake Lucerne.
As the drizzly weather persevered, we went on to talk over with Florida’s Natural Visitor Center in Lake Wales, about an hours drive south of Orlando, the place I acquired a highly sturdy information of Central Florida’s citrus enterprise. I spent the afternoon in a different favourite allure in Lake Wales which holds two National Historic Landmarks: the Historic Bok Sanctuary, wherein I obtained to look the cosmetic of the Bok estate and its historical carillon tower, blended with a excursion thru the old Pinewood Estate, which turned into decked out in complete Christmas decorations.
During these 2 weeks in Florida, we bought uncovered to loads of its flora, plants and natural world, a great deal of which you run into casually even at the same time as playing golfing or picknicking by using the waterfront. Florida has a stunning amount of common variety and I loved gazing the several varieties of birds, lizards, and squirrels. The in basic terms aspect we didn’t get to peer changed into a dwell alligator (with the exception of the well-hidden rear cease of a small alligator in the time of our swamp buggy tour – lamentably I couldn’t even get a reputable snapshot of that one..). Apparently wintry weather time is simply too cold for these creatures to pop out of the water…
On our pressure dwelling house, on a bright sunny day (of course…), we stopped off in St. Augustine, a historic town founded with the aid of the Spaniards inside the 1500s, and the oldest continuously inhabited city within the United States – a strong photogenic position, I should still upload.
So, you ask, is it doable to spend 2 weeks in Orlando without even surroundings foot internal a subject park and still have an honest time? Well, based at the above itinerary I’d say that my plans to explore Orlando off the overwhelmed path got here to full fruition.
Mission comprehensive.