Orlando

Donna's clinic sent her to the North American Veterinary Conference in Orlando, FL January 16-19, and I tagged along. We left On Friday the 16th and arrived at around 7:00. After checking into our hotel, the Comfort Suites adjacent to Old Town in Kissimmee, we enjoyed a tasty steak dinner at the nearby Logan's Roadhouse.

While Donna did conference stuff during the day on Saturday and Sunday, I got out and explored. On Saturday I found myself in Celebration, a small community within Kissimmee; it has a neat little downtown with neat shops and restaurants.



One of many Ferraris and Ducatis that we saw - sure don't see many of these in Columbia.



There was a lake in the middle of Celebration that I enjoyed walking around, and I happened upon a mother duck tending to quite a handful of little ducklings.



I bought an incredibly tasty oven sub from a little pizza joint and sat next to the lake and enjoyed it while enjoying the warmth of the sun and a gentle breeze coming off the water. Several birds were likewise enjoying the beautiful day, including this fellow.



I was able to add a rather unique post office to my post office photo collection.



From there I headed into downtown Kissimmee where I encountered the Monument of States, a sculpture comprised of rocks from all 50 states and several foreign countries. I managed to find the representative stones from South Carolina and Mississippi.





That night we explored Old Town, an interesting collection of shops, restaurants, and amusement parks rides. Except for the rides, it is similar to the market area of Charleston. We had a pretty good dinner at Kool Katz Grill & Pub and then enjoyed checking out the shops. I was tempted by the go cart track but never got around to getting on it. :-) We caught a neat drive-through of classic cars; there must have been around a hundred that drove through.







On Sunday while Donna was doing conference stuff I explored downtown Orlando and paid a visit to the World's Largest McDonald's.





I enjoyed driving around Orlando and surrounding towns and discovering a few new post offices to add to my collection. The architecture down there is certainly different than what I'm accustomed to.

Sunday night we ate at a really great Mexican restaurant, Garibaldi, which sounds more like an Italian restaurant, but it was definitely Mexican. Great food and decor.

Monday before heading home we checked out the vendor exhibit section in the main conference convention center (3 convention centers were utilized - this was truly a HUGE conference.) There were tons of vendors; it was hard to believe that there were two more vendor areas! We saw Annemarie Lucas from Animal Planet's "Animal Precinct" representing the ASPCA.



En route home we did one of our favorite things to do when traveling: stopped for a meal at Cracker Barrel. :-) It was a fun weekend getaway.