orlando

saturday i was fortunate enough to get the whole day off! i have 2 good friends in the orlando area - tommy and katie - and the distance from cocoa beach to orlando is akin to the distance from annapolis to dc, so i figured why not head over and check it out. tommy is in winter park (north of orlando) for campus crusade staff training. katie has been coming to orlando every summer to do a ministry internship with campus outreach at disneyworld. both pretty cool reasons to be in florida. so i woke up, and headed to orlando!



if you were a steering wheel, this is what it would have looked like:


orlando, on what i have found to be a fairly typical florida day (though, usually the clouds look a bit more menacing... is this rainy season or something?):


what an awesome dealership to buy a car from (you might have to click for a closer shot):



so first i drove to meet tommy in winter park. allie was in town visiting him, so it was like a double whammy of visitation. i got a little lost due to some confusion with construction and railroad tracks, but was soon reunited with my northern virginia familia away from familia (that's for allie... she's italiash).

we walked all around the bomb little town of winter park. its sort of a cross between fredericksburg and bethesda. if you can imagine the route 95 hotel/fast food section of fredericksburg, and then in a completely different block quaint little downtown bethesda, that's winter park (i realize that fredericksburg actually has both the rest stop feel and the historic downtown on its own, but this was just what i thought of at the time, and based on the specific architecture and layout of downtown winter park, i felt it was closer to the feel of bethesda than old town fredericksburg, so, yeah, that's my reasoning).

naturally, we decided to get some italian food. we were looking for tacos, but the Argentinian woman we found sadly alerted us of the taco deficiency in their humble town. i don't even know if that's pc. do they even eat tacos in Argentina... moooooommmmm?

here is us having some blurry fun in a heavy sprinkle on the sidewalk after an amazing lunch, miraculously served without spillage from our hungover waiter:


well, time was a tickin and i had to drop these bammas. just kidding. but time was up, and i was starting to feel like a 3rd wheel. just kidding. time was just up, but that sounded like the right/funny thing to say. thanks for lunch tommy! on the day went.

at this point i drove on to meet katie who was about 20 mins away. though with disney traffic, better make that 30. ok, it was light traffic. but still.

i parked at wallgreens and katie and i drove to a nearby town called Celebration. if you ignored the link, you didn't realize that Celebration is a disney (sorry, i don't mean to be inconsistent in my capitalization of proper nouns) master-planned community. katie was saying something about how it was in honor of a concept walt disney originally had for epcot center that never came to fruition before his passing. it was definitely a little "too perfect" of a town. one of those quaint little towns modeled after colonial type architecture, with all original restaurants and stores.

though it was a peculiar town, it made for a great place to visit, and a great place to find rocking chairs and a pond to have some conversation next to (sorry to end in a preposition... man, what is getting in to me tonight). here are a few shots from Celebration:

view across the pond in the town center (or centre?):


here is my emo rocking chair in black and white shot:


please notice the little dot in the middle of the still water. yes, that is an alligator hungry for some little kids fishing (again, you may want to click to zoom in for a closer gander)!


later in the evening we met up with one of katie's friends from the program and headed to this offbeat, folksy little Orlandan mom-and-pop type burger/salad place called ruby tuesday. supposedly there's only one in the united states. needless to say, it felt good to do something different, you know? here is a picture of two people who love the song fergalicious:


the day sort of blew by fast. before i knew it we had to call it a night.

after orlando, i headed back to cocoa beach to meet up with greg, my co-worker (also drummer for big church at mclean bible-- perhaps you know him?), to hit up some local music spots. that was tight too. man, what a jam packed day!

all in all orlando was super fun and totally worth it. not that it really matters to most people reading this either way. i just feel like blogs are supposed to have some sort of closure like this.

-m-