5/23/99
 

    Well, what can we say, Florida is a great place to spend a weeks worth of vacation time in... Of course, most people vacation in Florida
    because of the Disney theme parks, but Florida has other things to offer as well.

    The first four days of our vacation was spent in Orlando, just a ten minute drive to Disney's World front porch. This fact alone probably
    saved us hours of park time and traffic heads...

            Speaking of traffic.... These are only my observations, but I think they lead to a pretty grim painting of how people
                                            in Florida drive.

    First of all, about 85% of the driver's I saw either sporadically or never used their turning signals. When I say this I am
    including several police cars that justified this rather upsetting behavior. Maybe its me, but when that many people are
    not using their turn signals, it leads me to believe that Florida has "outlawed" the use of the darn things. <well, what else can it be>

    Secondly, this is positive so hear me out... I can't stand driving into a new area and trying to find where I am going with those
    little green signs. Often times I find myself, with the help of others in the car as well, saying "Mercer..... Mercer... Mercer.... Oh,
    there it is..." as I am entering the four way intersection or the wrong side of a three/four line main road. But, Orlando has this
    great system which over steps this problem.

        About every .5 to 2 miles, depending on what area your in, there are LARGE u-turn sections. I found these u-turns to be
        very helpful since we didn't know the area that well and missed our turn offs quit often. But to our defense many other people
        were using the u-turns, so someone did some thinking with the tourists in mind... Thank you...

    Getting back to the vacation portion of this letter...

    We had a great time in Orlando. The first day we decided to visit MGM Studios, what a wonderful place that was.  Stacy and I acted
    as if we were kids and just ran around the whole theme park trying to soak up every bit of the entertainment. Here is a list of what
    we saw:

    The second day we were in Orland we spent at Epcot Center. Basically, I viewed Epcot as a human zoo with about eleven different parts
    of the world coming together in one place. Yes it was nice, but the zoo image really never left my mind... This is what we saw with
    our one day pass to this park:

    Our third day in Orlando was spent at the Magic Kingdom... Not much to say about this place, if you have been to Disney Land in California
    this is pretty much the same thing, only BIGGER... We had a great day going to the different shows and rides that both of us remember from
    our seperate childhoods.

    We were initially planning on spending our fourth day at Universal Studios, but decided to spend the day just relaxing. So we did some local
    shopping and watched the new movie "THE MUMMY". The movie is the standard Mummy flick, except the special effects were updated and
    the powers of the Mummy had been "super charged" from the regular Mummies we know from Hollywood.

    Finally we went to the last leg of our vacation, Daytona Beach. Basically this was the R&R part of our vacation and what a peaceful three
    days and two nights it was. We spent time on the beach, eating, sleeping, pool, shopping and tanning. Speaking of tanning, the last day Stacy
    and I both got a little too much sun and would pay for that with the next 4-5 days of a terrible sun burn. :-)  Well, at least we did the color we
    were looking for from the great state of Florida...

    Well, that pretty much wraps up our Florida Vacation... Two things the Stacy and I learned from this vacation; first and foremost is that
    no matter where we go on our next vacation, we will bring sun screen. Secondly, vacations are very important to us and that we will
    take at least one good (1 week or longer) vacation a year.