KIOSK HELLO

20 days and 4,100 miles dri­ven inside Florida, we saw a lot of the state and there is still more to see. It was great. I think every­one needs to know. Do not be afraid…

Day 1:

Arrive in Orlando Feb­ru­ary 26th, both of us were sur­prised by the lack of green, the nature was quite brown. Thank­fully very lit­tle Dis­ney at the air­port. We decided not to visit the M. MOUSE on this trip but as a con­ces­sion we booked a room at the Walt Dis­ney World Swan “Resort” within the mag­i­cal zone. Designed by the archi­tect Michael Graves in the 80’s and opened in 1990 the com­pound is described as “enter­tain­ment archi­tec­ture”- inter­est­ing… I am not a fan of Graves even though I have always liked his teaket­tle, the one with the bird  from the 80’s not the knock-off he did for Tar­get. I was hop­ing dur­ing the stay I would become more fond of his work,  how­ever, the only thing I could think was, how does he keep pro­duc­ing such crap? Then I remem­bered Michael Eis­ner was behind this baby and I don’t have to won­der much more, but then again, what excuse does Prince­ton have? Jesus… the idea of “when it is 25 years old the build­ing will look great, you will be nos­tal­gic for that time” is totally out the win­dow with his work. Paired with it’s sis­ter hotel The Dol­phin, I can’t say I remem­ber much about the expe­ri­ence, beyond the scale being utterly mas­sive, besides I was glad it was paid for with our Star­wood Amex points and it was a pretty cool con­cept to sleep in “enter­tain­ment archi­tec­ture”.  Any­way, was glad to get out of the mouse domain when we left even though the staff was hyper-nice the entire time. Out of the Dis­ney com­pound and into the wilds of Florida. By the way, the rea­son for the com­pound being so huge was appar­ently because Walt was pissed hote­liers were open­ing their inns adja­cent to the Cal­i­for­nia loca­tion, Dis­ney­land. Appar­ently he felt they were steal­ing from his glory, in a way WDW was kind-of the first gigan­tic gated com­mu­nity, you feel it right when you get there, which leads me to Cel­e­bra­tion, Florida but we will come to that later. WDW is appar­ently in cri­sis now with 400+ employ­ees being laid off last Fri­day and 600 exec­u­tives recently being offered buy-outs.  That’s a lot of cry­ing mice. Damn, will our gov­ern­ment get involved in a Dis­ney bail-out, imag­ine that imag­i­neers! Mouse ears in the White House!