Day 4 - Orlando

Yesterday was our last day of meetings. In the evening, we kicked back with a pizza (courtesy of our friends, Paul & Sonja) and a couple of movies (courtesy of the Movie Channel). We were just going to watch one (“Last Holiday” with Queen Latifah), but ended up watching a second one (“John Q” with Denzel Washington), so got to bed kinda late :/ Boy, it’s tough watching movies on TV after having watched them on video or DVD for so long. All those commercials! I could have read a short novel in all the time that they took!

Today, we slept in, but still needed a good cup of Starbucks to get us into gear for the day. After that, we headed out with Paul & Sonja and their kids to Downtown Disney, a free-admission place where we could stroll around and see a variety of shops and restaurants built around various Disney themes. The quality and entertainment value of all this was pretty impressive. We browsed around the T-Rex dinosaur shop, the Rain Forest Café restaurant & shop, and a few others.

Lunch was at Planet Hollywood.

Then we decided to drive on to Tampa and see the ocean. None of us had ever been to Tampa so we drove around for a while trying to find a beach or other waterfront access place. Finally we decided to use the GPS Paul had brought along and eventually found a little park that allowed us to walk out on a long pier. The wind coming off the water was wicked and we were all soon quite chilled. It felt good to get back into the car!

Supper was at a Cracker Barrel restaurant on the way back to Orlando. These are great restaurants with good food at a decent price, great service, and an interesting tourist shop at the entrance. I think we spent as much time looking at all the neat things in that shop as we did in the restaurant eating our meal :)

Tomorrow we fly to Dallas. However, we have to be out of our guesthouse prior to 10 o’clock tomorrow a.m. so Kathy spent some time packing our suitcases after we got home this evening around 10 p.m. I worked on a presentation I need to give to some folks on Monday morning (and wrote this blog :)