I spent a long weekend down in Central Florida this month, escaping the Michigan winter for a few days.
I've been known to do this sort of thing on occasion. (If you'd like to see more pictures than those shown here,
I've got that covered.)
The Leaving
The idea for the trip came out of a conversation with my lady friend Sarah, as we were both bemoaning the long slog through winter weather from the new year until spring. She's mostly a Michigan homebody, with just a few trips elsewhere, and none that were near an ocean. Seemed like a perfectly good excuse to go south in February! Convenient Valentine's Day present, too. We flew non-stop from Grand Rapids to Orlando - the availability of a direct flight was a major consideration in the choice of destination! Flight got us in late Friday night, so the real trip didn't start until the next day.
Day One: The Coast
It's only about an hour's drive from Orlando out to Cape Canaveral and the
Kennedy Space Center, which I greatly enjoyed visiting. The Space Shuttle exhibit with the Atlantis orbiter was particularly impressive, in my opinion.
I've seen the full-size mockup orbiter that they have in Houston, but it was awfully cool to see the real thing in person! There's plenty of other space flight history as well, plus exhibits about current action in areas like Mars exploration and cooperation with private companies like SpaceX. We missed the
SpaceX heavy launch by about a week, but that's probably just as well since it would have extremely crowded.
In the afternoon we drove down to Cocoa Beach and spent a few hours at the shore. Beautiful day, in the upper 70s/low 80s with a nice breeze. Plenty of other folks out enjoying it as well! Particularly nice since it was Sarah's first time at an ocean beach. Lake Michigan beaches are fine, of course, but it's a very different feeling with that salt water breeze and looking out at an entire ocean!
After driving back to Orlando, we cleaned up and took a nap. Being at the beach is hard work! For dinner, we went over to the Universal City Walk. Tons of restaurants to choose from and various live entertainment around the area. And most importantly, a very large cookies-and-cream milkshake for dessert.
Day Two: Non-Mouse Orlando
The second day was spent seeing some sights around Orlando that aren't theme parks. The
Harry P. Leu gardens are part of an association with the
Meijer Gardens here in Grand Rapids, which is how I heard about them. The grounds are beautiful, though be warned that the parking is very limited! We happened to visit when they had an exhibition of Lego sculptures around the park, which made it even more fun.
Later, we headed over to the
Orlando Science Center and spent a few hours there. My favorite part of that was their wetlands habitat, which had fish and turtles and some small alligators. We even happened to catch feeding time for the gators, which was cool to see.
In the evening, we had a nice Valentine's Day dinner (a few days early, avoid the crowds) and went downtown to
Orlando's Wall Street plaza area to see the nightlife. I particularly enjoyed the entirely Christmas-themed
Frosty's Christmastime Lounge, where pride of place over the bar is given to a days-until-Christmas countdown clock.
Day Three: House of Mouse
We picked Epcot as our Disney park for the trip. We could have tried to hit a couple more parks in the first two days, but decided we'd rather not overdo it. I've been to Epcot before, but that was so many years ago that I hardly remembered the details, and what I did remember was all good.
You can schedule up to three rides ahead of time with the Fastpass program and skip the longest part of the line. Sadly, I wasn't able to sign up for the Frozen ride since it was already fully booked, but we did get into both Spaceship Earth and the Finding Nemo Aquarium ride. Both of those were great, though for different reasons. Spaceship Earth is fun mostly for the ride itself: going up into that big globe, through some (extremely simplified) history, and into a planetarium-style space view. The Nemo ride wasn't that impressive, but the aquarium afterward is excellent with some nice big tanks and plenty of underwater species to observe.
We walked around the World Showcase a couple of times. Went pretty quick at first, heading straight to Italy for lunch (which was excellent). Once we were less hungry, we took a bit more time and looked around several of the country pavilions. I liked Japan and Italy particularly, but they're all great.
It so happened that we picked a day during the Epcot International Festival of the Arts, so in addition to all the usual sights, there were a bunch of artist pavilions set up around the area. We saw lots of paintings, sculptures, and various other artistic pieces as we walked around the area. A few live displays, too, such as creation of specially dyed scarves and other clothing items.
Near the end of the day, we caught several live performances. Acrobats at the China pavilion, drummers at the German pavilion, and a performance of several Broadway songs by Ashley Brown and Josh Strickland. The Broadway performance was particularly fun - my favorite was Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious from Mary Poppins, and Sarah really enjoyed Let It Go from the upcoming Frozen Broadway show.
Finally, at the end of the day was the nightly fireworks display. It was a little underwhelming, to be honest. Possibly we were just too tired to enjoy it, and certainly we didn't have the best viewing location. Nonetheless, even an underwhelming display of fireworks is still pretty impressive.
Day Four: The Bonus Day
We were supposed to leave very early on a 7 AM flight, but we were late to the airport and missed our scheduled flight. Entirely my fault, that was - I'm so used to smaller airports with lower passenger volumes, as well as traveling with only a carry-on bag, that I assumed an hour before the flight would be enough time. And it would have been, if we weren't trying to check bags and get through security in the hectic mass of people that is Orlando International. We ended up with four days in the warm weather instead of three, which isn't a terrible thing, and had no trouble on the second return attempt. I was very glad that I'd paid for refundable tickets so changing flight times was a simple process!
So after our misadventure at the airport, we had an extra day to fill. As boring as this sounds, about half of it was spent sleeping. We'd been up early to catch our flight (though obviously not early enough) and were tired after that full day at Epcot.
In the afternoon, we went over to the I-Drive 360 entertainment area. There's a bunch of restaurants and gift shops surrounding the main building with the
Sea Life Aquarium and
Coca-Cola Orlando Eye Ferris wheel. We enjoyed both, though I definitely think the aquarium came out as the most fun. It's small, but had lots of good displays and a hands-on section. Sarah liked the various types of rays particularly, and I was happy to see that the hands-on part had a selection of northern Pacific tide pool creatures...not so different from what I used to see on the Oregon coast.
Finally, we took one more trip into the mouse lair to visit Disney Springs. Had some dinner at the House of Blues, saw a few different live musical performances around the area, and of course saw any number of gift shop displays.
The Return
The next morning we slept in, with our flight scheduled for the afternoon. Well, Sarah slept in. I went out jogging, promptly got lost, and ended up going about three times farther than I'd intended. Missed breakfast, but no harm done. The airport experience this time went smoothly. We actually had about an extra hour to kill, which is par for the course with air travel. Arrive when you're supposed to, and end up waiting. Arrive later, and not enough time. We had to rush a bit when we landed in Grand Rapids to get Sarah to work, but that's to be expected when your plans change by an entire day.
All told, it was a very enjoyable trip. Everything from the space coast to Epcot was a fun adventure, and even our air travel fail was only a fairly minor hassle. The rest of winter will be a little less depressing after a few days in the sun!
