{"id":204,"date":"2011-07-30T00:39:06","date_gmt":"2011-07-30T04:39:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.goetz.ca\/blog\/?p=204"},"modified":"2011-07-30T00:39:14","modified_gmt":"2011-07-30T04:39:14","slug":"orlando","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goetz.ca\/blog\/archives\/204","title":{"rendered":"Orlando"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our stay in Orlando will amount to pretty much exactly 48 hours, which is, I suspect, unusual for most people who visit here. In our case, we thought it would be nice to have a brief stopover at Disney World before continuing up the East Coast towards New York.<\/p>\n

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First day on the train<\/p><\/div>\n

We left Miami on Wednesday morning; the train departed promptly at 8:20am. The journey from Miami to Orlando is only five hours, and we had regular coach seats which are equivalent to business class on an airplane – deep recline, leg & foot rests, long tray table, power at your seat, etc. The scenery was a mix of the coastal communities on running up from Miami, and then more open green spaces and orange groves in central Florida.<\/p>\n

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Dolphin Hotel<\/p><\/div>\n

Orlando, of course, is unique unto itself with the proliferation of theme parks and resorts. We’re staying at the Dolphin Hotel<\/em> at Disney World, mainly because we got a very good online deal. It will be the most opulent place we will be staying at on our trip. And while it is nice, I think we all feel that our style is a little bit more Miami hostel-hotel then Orlando resort.<\/p>\n

With only one full day here, we decided a while ago that we would go to one of the water parks – cheaper and also appropriate in this summer heat (today it was 94\u00c2\u00b0F = 34\u00c2\u00b0C). It was a great day, sadly without pictures as I didn’t bring the camera to the park (I only brough the essentials as we didn’t rent a locker). We were there early enough to be first in line when they dropped the rope to let you walk briskly to the water slides of your choice. They also have a huge wave pool that generates 7-foot waves every 90 seconds — it is a memorable experience rising high on a wave seeing this sea of people below you about to be engulfed.<\/p>\n

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Rare picture of Mike<\/p><\/div>\n

I will admit that I’m a bit of a Disney fan; these theme parks hold many fond memories for me as a child and it’s particularly enjoyable to pass that along to my own kids. Having said that, I’m glad we’re not staying longer – while Walt Disney may be the poster boy for the American Dream, I think there are many more places for us to explore that are more real<\/em> and also undoubtedly less expensive. This is the first place I’ve ever been to where they made you pay a mandatory<\/em> 13% service charge… at a cafeteria.<\/p>\n

Tomorrow we leave Orlando for the overnight train to New York. I now have my iPhone set up and I hope to do a bit of live blogging as we make our way North.<\/p>\n

Posted from Orlando, Florida, United States.<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A 48-hour stopover in Orlando to experience some very hot weather and an expensive water park. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":206,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,36],"tags":[42,43],"class_list":["post-204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mike","category-usa2011","tag-disney","tag-weather"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.goetz.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/IMG_3619.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s1aZFm-orlando","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goetz.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goetz.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goetz.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goetz.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goetz.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goetz.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goetz.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goetz.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goetz.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goetz.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}