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Feature Articles for March 2003

Ten Under $10 Orlando Attractions That Are Easy on the Wallet
It’s easy to spend big bucks in Orlando. The major theme parks charge daily adult admissions of nearly $50. But there’s plenty to do in the Orlando area without breaking the bank. Here are 10 recommendations from Orlando expert Kelly Monaghan, author of The OTHER Orlando: What to Do when You’ve Done Disney and Universal. Keep in mind that the quoted prices are for adults. Seniors and children usually pay even less.

$10 - House of Presidents
Thirty minutes by car from Orlando’s bustling International Drive sits a small porticoed house that houses an even smaller porticoed house. Here you will find the life work of John Zweifel and his wife Janóa meticulous 60- by 22-foot model of the White House executed in a scale of one inch to the foot. You can spot pens on tables, cigar burns on tabletops, even the occasional gravy stain. The clocks tick, the phones ring, the television sets are on. The Zweifels and hundreds of volunteers have spent over 500,000 man-hours to bring the model to its present state. Anyone who’s into modeling, presidential lore, or dollhouses will want to visit this astonishing work.

$9 - Flying Tigers Warbird Restoration Museum
The dusty hangar at the end of a runway at the Kissimmee Airport is home to the very serious (and expensive!) business of restoring battered and crumpled warplanes to flying trim once again. Fortunately, owner Tom Reilly and his wife Suzzie couldn’t bear to keep this labor of love all to themselves, so they opened their treasure trove of restored planes and historical oddities.
You can wander through on your own, but unless you’re a real military aviation expert, it will probably make little sense to you. Far better to wait for one of the regular tours that take you around, through, and under the hodgepodge of planes and into the workshop where two B-17s and two Corsairs are being resurrected by dedicated craftsmen. If you’re really lucky, you may arrive in time to see a B-25 bomber rumble down the runway and make a flyover escorted by a Mustang fighter, just as in its heyday.

$8 - Winter Park Scenic Boat Tour
The little town of Winter Park has 17 lakes. Thanks to the operators of these modest, flat pontoon boats, you can visit three of them on a leisurely one-hour cruise. There’s plenty of bird life to be seen on this tour, herons, muscovy ducks and ospreys among them. You’ll also get a bit of local history and a strong dose of real estate envy. You slip between the lakes through narrow canals originally cut by logging crews in the 1800s. It’s not quite Venice, but it makes for an unusual and relaxing outing.

$7- Trolley and Train Museum- Trolley and Train Museum
If you think your old HO-gauge model train set was pretty nifty, you may want to do a reality check at the Trolley and Train Museum. This combination train store/museum boasts one of the largest G-gauge layouts in the world – and G-gauge is four times bigger than HO. The layout occupies 4,800 square feet of space in its own room and required more than 3,000 feet of track and some 4,700 man-hours to complete. The result is impressive, rising high overhead and twisting and turning through mountain passes, quaint small towns, industrial zones and idyllic farm valleys. There’s even a spur line to Santa-Land.

$6 - Bonanza Miniature Golf
The Orlando area is home to some of the most elaborate miniature golf courses in the world. This one offers a Gold Rush theme and two complete 18-hole courses, ‘The Prospector’ (the easier of the two) and ‘The Gold Nugget.’ Putt your way over a three-story mountain past cascading waterfalls, old mining sluices, trestle bridges, mountain pools and cool grottoes. The course is compact, well maintained, and a lot of fun. You can play the second 18 holes for half price.

$5 - Audubon Center for Birds of Prey
Each year, the Center takes in about 650 wounded and orphaned raptors from all over Florida, tends to their wounds, and nurses them back to health with the ultimate goal of releasing them back into the wild. About 40 percent make it.

You won’t be able to see the rehabilitation process; these birds are shielded from public view lest they become habituated to humans, thus lessening their odds for survival back in the wild. What you will see, in a series of attractive aviaries, are birds whose injuries are so severe that they cannot be released. There are about 32 different species of raptors housed here. They range from tiny screech owls to vultures. There are also a fair number of ospreys, red-tailed hawks, kites and others, including a pair of bald eagles.

$4 - Harry P. Leu Gardens
Deeded to the city by a local magnate and amateur botanist, the Gardens encompasses 50 acres of manicured grounds and formal gardens on the shores of Lake Rowena, a short drive from downtown Orlando. Camellias were Harry Leuís first love and the place is full of them – over 2,000 – making this the largest documented collection of camellias in North America. A small hothouse tucked away in a corner of the estate houses orchids, ferns, aroids and other cold-sensitive plants.

$3 - Morse Museum of American Art
Fans of Tiffany glass won’t want to miss the Morse. It houses the world’s most comprehensive collection of Tiffany’s works – paintings, jewelry and mosaics, as well as the stained glass windows, lamps, vases, inkwells and other decorative objects for which Louis Comfort Tiffany is best known. As brilliant a marketer as he was an artist, Tiffany saw the World’s Fair of 1893 as an opportunity to spread his fame worldwide. So he put his best foot forward by creating an enormous chapel interior for the exhibit. Everything in it, from a massive electrified chandelier, to a baptismal font, to intricate mosaic pillars, to the stunningly beautiful stained-glass windows, was of Tiffany design. You’ll find the chapel lovingly restored here.

$2 - Spence-Lanier Pioneer Center
Sometimes referred to as the Pioneer Museum, this open-air venue is a labor of love of the Osceola County Historical Society. The highlights are two old wooden buildings, rescued from oblivion and moved to this site as reminders of Central Florida’s not too distant, but nonetheless vanished, past. Across the street from the four-acre site of the museum is the Mary Kendall Steffee Nature Preserve, a 7.8-acre patch of Shingle Creek Swamp, where you can glimpse the occasional eagle or other large raptor.

$1 - Kelly Park/Rock Springs
As its name suggests, Rock Springs bubbles up from a cleft in a rock outcropping and, instead of spreading out into a pool, becomes a swiftly running stream that quickly slows to a meander. The activity of choice here, and the major reason for the park’s obvious popularity, is riding down the stream in an inner tube or on a float. Kids, and not a few grown-ups, jump into the headwaters by the dozens and bob and splash their way downstream for about a mile. The trip takes about 25 minutes at a leisurely float. There are exits from the river along the way and an excellently maintained network of boardwalks (with flooring designed to protect the barefooted) let you carry your tube back to the beginning for another go.

Full details on these and other great things to see and do can be found in The Other Orlando: What To Do When You’ve Done Disney and Universal by Kelly Monaghan. Kelly is also the author of Universal Orlando: The Ultimate Guide To The Ultimate Theme Park Adventure. The books are available in bookstores nationwide, at online bookstores, or at www.TheOtherOrlando.com, where Monaghan provides updates to both books.