QC11-12 The I-4 corridor

March 1, 2011 (Tue) Lakeland, FL to Plant City, FL 65/83° - Now this is interesting (read complicated). Because this is the Q chronicle, the dateline should be Lakeland because that's where Q is. But we are in Plant City. After breakfast this morning, we packed up Lamont for a two day trip west. The park where Gordy and Ruth live is not very friendly to anything bigger than a large station wagon, so we have had to relegate Q to a small parking lot over by the swimming pool in the past. Being able to bring a car this time is another advantage of towing. We got here, without incident, at about 1:00 and spent the afternoon catching up on family news.

March 2, 2011 (Wed) Plant City, FL (2) 66/79° - A two mile walk in Alderman's Ford Park this morning was the highlight of the day. Otherwise a family day with Gordy and Ruth.

March 3, 2011 (Thur) Plant City, FL to Lakeland, FL 66/79° - After a leisurely breakfast with Gordy and Ruth, we packed up the car and headed back to Lakeland. Plant City is known as the Winter Strawberry Capital because three quarters of the nation's midwinter strawberries come from here. Florida's Strawberry Festival is held here ever year causing the expected heave traffic and congestion. Today is the first day of this years event. We cleverly avoided the nightmare by going east instead of south through the city. It was the way we wanted to go anyway.

We got back to Ed and Kathy's about 11:30am and we all went out for lunch at Five Guys Burgers and Fries.

March 4, 2011 (Fri) Lakeland, Fl (5) 63/80° - Today was the third day of the Flower and Garden Festival at Disney World. According to their publicity "The Epcot International Flower & Garden Festival presented by HGTV is a spring special event filled with Disney character topiaries, a colorful array of flowers, gardens, live music and special presentations. It's where Disney springs to life! The festival is held from March 2 to May 15, 2011." It certainly was beautiful!

Many (if not most) people come/go to Epcot for the rides but with Ed and Kathy - who work at Disney for many of their special events - as our guides we spent almost all of our time looking at the gardens, floral displays and topiaries. We did go on two of the rides in the The Land Pavilion - Living with the Land and  Soarin'. We've gone Soarin' before and it still takes our breath away!!  Living with the Land was a boat ride through an area where, among other things, the newest methods of growing food are shown and explained.  We saw tomatoes, pumpkins and squash on trees, various veggies grown in aquaculture, and a bunch of other interesting growing methods - with spectacular results. i.e we saw a 7 1/2 lb lemon! They also had display fish tanks, showing how fish farming works.  Really interesting.   

We had lunch at the Mexican Restaurant in "Mexico" in the International Area.  The 3 course Mexican meal was wonderful!! 

March 5, 2011 (Sat) Lakeland, Fl (6) 61/82° - Yesterday was a long tiring day for all four of us so we spent today catching up. It seemed as though there was always someone napping at any given time all day long. If the napper wasn't human, he/she was animal - dog or cat. Otherwise we worked on various individual projects.

Q073851 Ed & Kathy's yard (x6)
__________________________________

March 6, 2011 (Sun) Lakeland, FL to Titusville, FL  (123/2932 miles) 61/79° - We pulled out of Ed and Kathy's yard at about 8:00 and drove separately over to the Publix supermarket. We had a few things to pick up (most importantly The New York Times) so decided to wait til after we'd shopped to hook-up. Then it was I-4 to Orlando and US 50 East to The Great Outdoors near Titusville, FL. We found Mike and Dorcas' pad with no problem - we'd been here several time before - and settled into the empty site across the road at about 10:30. We spent the rest of the day sitting out on their patio beside their 5th wheel chatting and catching up. We were on our own for lunch but they took us over to The Dixie Crossroads, a restaurant they'd raved about in the past, for a delicious seafood dinner. We walked out feeling well satisfied even with "small" portions.

March 7, 2011 (Mon) The Great Outdoors  (2) 55/74° - There's a very good yarn shop in Cocoa Village south of Titusville that Joy and Dorcas visited this afternoon. Mark and Mike tagged along. The village has a lot of small interesting shops that cater to tourists ashore from the many cruise ships that dock in nearby Port Canaveral. In addition to being a stop the area is the terminus for several large cruise lines. Seafood restaurants abound in the Port Canaveral area, especially along Glen Creek Drive on the water front where the ships can be seen across the water. Dorcas and Mike mentioned one restaurant whose name inspired a "try" - Fishlips Waterfront Bar and Grill. It features seafood in a huge sports bar, a large indoor dining room and at outside waterfront tables. We chose the regular dining room. Mark and Joy shared a seafood platter (seasoned grilled snapper, grouper, sea scallops and jumbo shrimp). Delicious! Dorcas raved about her lobster bisque and Mike devoured his Kahuna Burger with great pleasure. It was well worth the effort to find it.

Tomorrow we'll be on our own again. We'll be going back into the Ocala national Forest.

Q073974 The Great Outdoors #443 Oak Cove Dr w/e (x2)