My family decided to take a trip to Orlando this Christmas to get away from the cold weather. We expected weather to be cool and mild with highs in the 60s. The weather was wonderful with highs in the 60s and sometimes 70s. As an American I am referencing Fahrenheit temperatures.
My wife suggested that we go to Universal and I said that we could maybe do 1 or 2 days there. We ended up going to the park for 4 days, it was fun, but overcrowded and overpriced.
We stayed at a hotel with a walking path to the parks. The hotel also had a shuttle. For those that have not been to Universal Studios Orlando, there are 2 amusement parks with rollercoasters and on the way into the parks, everybody has to walk through Universal CityWalk. When you go to a Las Vegas casino, you have to walk through the casino to get to the hotel desk or any other attractions within. This serves a similar function, CityWalk is basically a huge mall full of restaurants and souvenirs. By the time that you pay to park your car or leave whatever shuttle or ride service brought you to the park, it's about half a mile, nearly 1 km of walking through a giant mall to go to the amusement park. Thankfully CityWalk does have some decent restaurants and we ate at a couple of them. I think we ate at Cowfish 2 or 3 times. We also ate at Bubba Gump's, Bend the Bao and Panda Express. They have a Jamaican Restaurant at CityWalk too. I wanted to try it, but it has outdoor seating which is not what I wanted at the times we could have stopped there.
For the weekend we were able to rent a car. We drove to New Smyrna beach about an hour away for 1 day. We ate some seafood there and played on the sand a little. There were a few people in the water, but it was cold enough that we managed to keep our kids from jumping in.
On Sunday we went to church and visited Wekiwa Springs, which I mentioned on my previous trip to FL. The Springs stay just over 70 degrees year round which was warmer than the outside temperature that day. There were a couple of people in the water and we thankfully kept the kids out again.
The bulk of the photos in this post are from Wekiwa Springs except for the first 1 and the last 4. The final 4 photos are from Universal and the Cowfish restaurant.
The first picture is where I dropped the pin on the map. We visited the Shingle Creek Regional Park at Steffee Landing where they had some beautiful hiking trails. It's another beautiful spot to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city. We stopped here on our last day before a hectic stop at the airport.
I hope this post has been helpful and informative. Let me know in the comments if you have recommendations for making my posts better. Thanks for all the reposts and upvotes.
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