2nd Honeymoon?

After leaving Ocala we did some ‘mythbusting’ to pass the time on the way to Orlando: 1) Florida’s toll roads don’t have any services (petrol stations) on them (confirmed) &, 2) your car runs out of petrol when the red light comes on telling you that you are out of fuel after the fuel gauge indicates less than ‘E’ (busted, by at least 30 miles).

When we arrived in Orlando we drove along International Drive to show Beth where we visited during our Honeymoon, 10 years earlier. We had already looked into staying at the same hotel that we stayed in while on Honeymoon, but we found out that it had closed in February. When we stayed at the Wynfield Inn it was a Virgin Flagship hotel & was quite nice but recent reviews on the Internet were all pretty much the same – very run down, but cheap to stay at. We figured that the hotel would have probably have been demolished by the time we were on vacation, but to our surprise it was still there, albeit fenced off. However, The Village Inn (the restaurant next to the hotel) was still open & when we ate there later that evening I ordered the same burger that I enjoyed while on Honeymoon!

We stayed at the Hotel next to the Wynfield Inn & as we walked over to the I-ride stop across from the hotel we had a nose over the fence & saw the remains of the room we had stayed in - cool! We subsequently found out that the site had been bought by the Hilton group of companies & that they were planning on building a new hotel on the site since it was really close to the huge new conference center under construction.

We spent about two hours on International Drive, but weren’t really that enthralled by it since we were all really excited about starting our vacation at Disney the next day. After eating a huge meal at The Village Inn we decided that we couldn't wait any longer & drove to Disney’s Shopping Village in Lake Buena Vista (which was about 15 minutes from the hotel) to have a look around one of the huge (& very busy) Disney stores. We spent about two hours in just one shop & then headed back to our hotel for an early-ish night to make sure that we were up as early as possible in the morning.