Orlando!

Alex and I spent the last three days in Orlando, Florida. We had some good times there. I think Orlando is one of those cities where there is supposed to be a ton of crime, but we didn't experience any of that. We actually went all over town and seemed to stay in all very good areas. That was of course by accident.

One thing I really hated about Orlando was that every freeway is a toll road except for one Interstate freeway. Orlando is a pretty big city and I find it shocking that every freeway is a toll road. There are no bridges over large bodies of water, it just cost money to merely use the freeway. I guess it makes the city a ton of money due to all the tourism that comes here to go to Disney World, but it wasn't fun to try to get around all the tolls. And trying to avoid the tolls when trying to get out of Orlando going east was quite the fiasco, but we made it. I wonder if we actually spent more money on gas driving all the round-about ways around town than if we had of just sucked it up and paid the tolls? I guess we will never know.  The bright side of not using the freeways was that we did get to see most of the city neighborhoods.

This is a sign we saw in one of the neighborhoods that I thought was kind of funny because it warns us that old people may be crossing the road:)

Lake Eola

Another thing about Orlando is that there is an insane amount of lakes. If you Google Orlando you will be able to see how many lakes are in the area. We probably drove by 10 to 15 in total and I'm sure there are much more. That didn't bother me, though. Lakes always seem to be so calming and serene.  There is a lake in Downtown Orlando that says it's what Orlando is known for. It's called Lake Eola. I had never heard of it before and you probably haven't either. When I think of Orlando I think of Disney World. Don't you? Anyways, it was a nice lake. The lakes aren't natural lakes, they are all man-made, but they are still very nice.

The fountain in Lake Eola

Enjoying some Mochi (Japanese ice cream)

We ate at an Irish Pub in Downtown Orlando and ordered the Irish Nachos. I had never had Irish Nachos and I probably won't ever have them again. They were absolutely delicious, but a huge recipe for a heart attack. It consisted of Irish Pub Chips "aka" double fried potato chips, sausage, melted cheddar cheese, lettuce, tomato and a huge dollop of sour cream. When the nachos came out from the kitchen my mouth dropped at how huge the plate of nachos were. It looked like there was about 4,000 calories worth of food! The sad thing is that Alex and I devoured it to the last chip. It was quite tasty. Looking back I wish I had of taken a picture of it and posted on the website This Why You're Fat because it was definitely fattening, good, but fattening:)

 We went to a Cafe Theater in an artsy part of Orlando. It was similar to the Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, TX, but it was much more fancy and didn't have as wide a variety of food and drinks. We watched the movie, Blue Valentine, and it was a rather depressing story. The acting was good, but it was one of those movies that makes you have a sad feeling like "Man, that's a sad story, life is lame..." but it doesn't make you want to cry. Basically, it's about a young couple who are married and how their marriage is crumbling apart. Really depressing. I wouldn't recommend seeing it.

This was our Theater seat

About to watch the movie

I've been reading some Mark Twain short stories lately and I find Mark Twain to be a very entertaining author. I have a book that contains fourteen fiction and non-fiction stories of his that never became very popular. My favorite one so far is called "My Literary Debut."  It's about the first story Mark Twain had published in a New York Journal. At the time Mark Twain wasn't known as Mark Twain. His real name was Samuel Clemens, and when he wrote the story for the Journal he signed it Mark Twain hoping that his "writing" name would become known on the East Coast, but when the Journal came out they messed up and published the Journal under the name Mike Swain. Haha, that's pretty funny:) The story was about a ship that had wrecked in the Pacific Ocean and the entire crew survived for 43 days at sea in a open survival boat on 10 days of food rations. The crew happened to land on the same island that Mark Twain was on when he was writing a column for the Sacramento Union. So, when the crew sailed back to San Francisco, Twain went with them and copied word for word two of crews the journals and interviewed a few of them. It's seriously an amazing story and it got Twain his first story in  Journal making him a "Literary" person. I would recommend you read it. It's not very long and it is quite intriguing.

We are back to the Atlantic Ocean and still enjoying great sunny weather. We had a rain shower yesterday morning, but it quickly cleared up.