Local Wisdom

I could have been anywhere the four days I recently spent at the International Builders Show in Orlando—Las Vegas, Dallas, Atlanta—any place with a huge convention center where natural light is scarce and the ambient sound level pervasively unnerving.

Like the out-of-town conventioneers, I battled traffic and the crowds, threading my way through the less-than-scenic International Drive area from one hotel to another and then back to the convention center until it all became a numbing blur.

And when it was all over I felt badly for the folks who were rushing down the Beachline toward the airport to catch planes home. If I, a Florida native, was suffering from sleep deprivation, sun deprivation and joy deprivation, what must it be like for them? What kind of impression of Orlando did they take home with them?

Maybe they did get beyond the insanity that is the convention center during IBS and sneaked in a quick visit to a hotel pool deck to soak up some winter sun. Or maybe they managed a visit to the mouse kingdom down the road. But that’s all carefully choreographed magic. I suspect many left missing out on the real Central Florida magic.

Here are some true Florida experiences I wish they could have enjoyed and that you, when you become a resident, can try at your leisure:

Spending all day at the end of a cypress tree-flanked dock, jutting into the fast flowing St. Johns River, thinking nothing as the tannin-brown water rolls by, feeling the warm sun on your back, a breeze on your face and an occasional tug at the worm at the end of a cane pole.

Watching your child on her knees in a strawberry field on a misty March morning, her mouth and clothes stained with juice, looking intently beneath leaves for more of the berries, their flavor so intensely sweet that even chocolate or cream would be a desecration.

Taking a Sunday drive along the gracefully curving bumpy brick streets of Orlando’s older neighborhoods, past homes built early in the last century, framed by even older live oak trees, their limbs dipping down onto azalea-accented lawns.?

Sitting in a rocker on a porch as the sun sets over a lake, leaving the sky pink and red and that color between pink and orange that will forever evoke the memory of a great-grandmother’s voice: “I always wished I had a dress that color.”

Walking onto an empty ball field to look up at the star-spangled eastern horizon as the crackling voice from NASA Mission Control counts down from a portable radio: “Three, two, one. We have lift off.” A few seconds later an other-worldly orange blaze archs slowly across the sky, dimming the stars until, all too soon, it disappears into black.
Welcome to the real Orlando.

Teresa Burney is a contributing editor of Big Builder magazine and a columnist for Orlando Homebuyer.