Florida

The Brunette and I are currently enjoying a little 'downtime' in Florida, hence the gap in my posts. In a repeat of our honeymoon, over 17 years ago now, we decided to re-visit the delights of Orlando. Nine days of lazing about by the pool interspersed with adventure drives into the hinterland. We call them adventure drives as whenever we leave the confines of our hotel we immediately get lost.

This isn't just a Florida thing, it applies anywhere in the States that we visit. It usually starts as soon as we pick up the hire car at the airport. We've been to California three times together and each time we've driven away from Los Angeles airport we've either taken the wrong turn or missed the right one, resulting in our arrival at our destination at least two hours later than planned, including one memorable drive through downtown L.A. at the height of rush hour.

Same thing this time. Our flight arrived on time at Orlando International, following which we were subjected to a one hour queue to get through immigration (sooo much fun), a further half hour queue for the car hire desk and a final hour of driving up and down and in and out of roads in search of the mythical SR528 Beach Line Expressway which would lead us to International Drive and our hotel - a journey that should have taken no longer than twenty minutes. Just what you need after a nine hour flight.

This is our third visit to Florida. During our inaugural honeymoon visit we rarely strayed from Orlando, other than trips to Busch Gardens in the west and Cocoa Beach/Kennedy Space Centre in the east. We did the whole Disney/Seaworld/Wet & Wild thing then and it was great fun, but exhausting.

On our second visit a couple of years later we flew to Miami, hired a car and drove across the everglades, up the west coast via Naples and Sarasota to St. Petersburg, across to the east coast via Orlando and back down to Miami via West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton etc. A fantastic drive but, again, pretty tiring.

On this trip we decided to stick to short adventure drives and to give the theme parks a miss (did I mention that we're getting older?) though we are going back to the 'awesome' Busch Gardens tomorrow (we're not that old). We probably won't get there, of course, so stay tuned for my next installment - "oldblodger & the Brunette say hi to Savannah".

Yours, lost in translation,

oldblodger