28.08.2012 – 28.08.2012  32 °C

‘Twas a big day of driving today.. Kingsland to Orlando.. Doesn’t sound far, doesn’t look far on the map but ‘twas FAR! Our first stop for the day was just offshore from Kingsland at St Mary’s Georgia. We stopped here based on a tip we had gotten the day before from another fellow traveller… It was one of those tips that we shouldn’t have taken (in fairness most tips are worth the detour.. not this one though). St Mary’s is a nice little seaside southern town. It would have been great if we hadn’t of stopped at dozens like it on our journey in the south!

It didn’t have the “blow me away” Ante Bellum houses that other southern towns (Beaufort/ Mobile/ Apalachicola all quickly come to mind) have, nor did it have any other sort of real appeal.. Just a nice seaside town that isn’t anywhere near as impressive as so many other southern sea side towns!

Once we crossed over into Florida our driving pace slowed rapidly. It’s one of the big issues with Florida… just too many damn people call this place home! I had planned our trip with us driving down the coast passed Jacksonville and then cutting across to Orlando… This just didn’t happen.. Pace of the traffic (and the almost continuous run of red lights) meant we were crawling along at a snail’s pace. We’d only made it as far as Jacksonville beaches by the time lunchtime rolled around… Not good when you have quite a ways to go to get to Orlando!

Our lunch was our last real “cook out bbq”. We knew that once we hit Orlando our need for our cooking utensils would have dried up, so we made the best of our last real chance to use all of our gear. We found ourselves a park (not seaside but pleasant) and D did the honours on our very spunky little Coleman bbq… We were all a little sad to see the end of this era.. Last meal using our very cool USA equipment 🙁

Our lunch was interrupted half way thru by the local school kids who use the park for their PE classes so we were soon cheered up watching the kids at play.. It was pretty amusing… the kids are doing “PE”.. One group of boys were racing matchbox cars right near us, a bunch of girls were practicing cheerleading, another playing some sort of dodge ball game… Clearly, anything goes with this PE teacher!

We had to stop dawdling our way down the Floridian coast, so after lunch I took us straight to the freeway. Three hours later and we rolled into Orlando! Here in Orlando we are staying near to Universal Studios (as we plan to visit this park not Disney) so this time around we were staying on the western side of the town (Disney is south west). We’d booked into a Vacation Club Resort Timeshare thingy. On check-in we got the treatment… first thing is we were told we had a free breakfast included but we had to “reserve our spot with 20 dollars”… Innocent enough, until you read the fine print! The free breakfast included an obligatory 90 min talk about the Timeshare after your breakfast!! 90mins!!! Strangely enough, we vetoed the free breakfast!

For all that said, we had actually scored a pretty sweet deal. We booked ourselves into a two bedroom apt for the next few days with complete facilities. It’s nice to actually have plenty of space to spread out and a nice huge shower with water pressure… Aahh I’m lovin’ it! First thing we did was bung on a load of washing (I reckon the washer is going to run non-stop whilst we are here) and headed out to grab some food for dinner. Tomorrow is our first day out in Universal World, will we do Islands of Adventure or will we do straight Universal…. Decisions, decisions!

Song of the Day– Tom Cochrane, Life is a highway (well Florida is anyhow!!)