We ended up going somewhere completely different for our winter trip – Florida. It turns out we are a Florida family – wonderful weather, wonderful food, wonderful sites, and, just a wonderful time. I had no idea Florida would be so great!
We’ve been a lot of places in the USA and most of our trips revolve around hiking but we’ve struck out the last few winter trips due to bad weather: last year was the ‘atmospheric river’ that completely ruined our time in Las Vegas and San Diego. It rained for five days in Las Vegas, something I didn’t realize could happen!? It’s also been cold, hiking in 0% humidity in the 50s is sorta chilly. So we decided to do something completely different which was go to Florida!
The beaches were great. We went to Paradise Beach on the Atlantic near Cape Canaveral and Clearwater near Tampa. Both beaches were great for different reasons and both beaches were made FARRRRR better once we discovered we could rent tents and chairs. It was fabulous to lounge on the beach, swim, and, collect seashells. What was shocking to us was the fact that Clearwater had sooooo many shells. There was a nice fluffy / poofy layer of sand and about an inch below was solid shells. It was neat!
I was shocked at the amazing food in Florida. We found some hard-to-get items like Char Kway Teow, a Singaporean delight, that was actually delicious and not crap, and some really fun things like tempura banana with vanilla ice cream. Of course, no warm area of America would be complete without a bunch of NYC style pizza and Florida didn’t disappoint; we found a delicious NYC style pizza place near where we were staying in Tampa that had the tagline “I AM BROOKLYN”. Not “BROOKLYN PIZZA”, just “BROOKLYN”. The pizza was amazing. I think the person who was bold enough to write “I AM BROOKLYN” was not joking. We also had some delicious BBQ from a random trailer parked at a random corner in a distant Tampa suburb and finished with some amazing soft serve ice cream made from freshly squeezed local oranges. It seemed like it was impossible to get a bad meal in Florida.
We went to Disney EPCOT and Disney Springs and both were fun. Disney Springs suffered from the crush of humanity, holy buckets were there so many people there! We enjoyed the Irish dancing and music at Raglans but that was about it. EPCOT was a lot of fun, it wasn’t all that busy and a whole lot of fun. We hadn’t planned on going to EPCOT and did so on a whim. It was a pretty expensive impulse purchase :). I really enjoyed the different pavilions and we spent quite a bit of time near the China / Japan / Italy pavilions – the food and activities were wonderful.
The nature / natural parts of Florida were super cool!!! We saw a huge alligator and enjoyed walking through the mangroves / swamps. It was way cooler than I would have guessed. The weather was also quite warm, we had a couple of mid-80s days and it felt amazing, especially after leaving Minnesota in the middle of a snow storm.
Driving in Florida sucked. Like not a little bit, but, totally sucked. The number of people driving 10-20mph under the speed limit was equal to the number of people driving 20-30mph over the speed limit. It was a total mess. Add in the fact that there are a million stop lights that don’t seem to be timed to anything in particular and it’s a recipe for a very difficult driving experience. I don’t think I saw anyone pulled over by police officers at all.
There were some strange parts of Florida. SOOOOOO much of Florida reminded me of mainland China: lots of traffic, tons of stoplights, lots of gaudy decorations on things, and a whole lot of beautiful new buildings intermixed with complete dumps. The other thing that was strange was the fact that all the public spaces run by the government were oldish, antiquated, and, not super nice. A remarkable difference compared to Minnesota city and state parks. Florida definitely felt like the USA but it still felt foreign. The other part that struck me about Florida was that pretty much everything was ‘pay to play’: lots of toll roads, fairly expensive beach parking, nothing about Disney was low cost, and, so on.
Overall, it was a great trip. I had no idea it would be so great. I’m looking forward to going back next year!!
Enjoy the photos!
