The orange blossoms come in late February, and for about three weeks the side streets between Park Avenue and Lake Osceola smell like someone spilled a perfume counter into the humidity. That is the moment a lot of Orlando residents remember why Winter Park exists. The rest of th
Orlando's happy hour map doesn't look like Miami's or Tampa's. Because so many of the city's best restaurants sit in strip centers, suburban plazas, and tucked-away neighborhoods rather than a single walkable downtown, the after-work crowd has learned to drive — and the bars that
Drive east on Colonial from downtown Orlando and somewhere around Mills Avenue the signage changes. English gives way to Vietnamese, the strip-mall vernacular shifts from chain pharmacies to family-run grocers, and the parking lots fill with people carrying takeout boxes of pho t
By Thursday of race week, the Walmart on US-27 has run out of folding chairs, the AM band is bleeding flat-six engine notes from preseason testing, and the long shoulder of Highway 98 is lined with RVs that have been parked there since the previous Saturday. Sebring does not warm
Magic Kingdom at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday in early December looks, briefly, like a different theme park. The day-guests have been ushered out, the wristbanded crowd is half the size, and Main Street, U.S.A. is lit in cranberry and pine. There is fake snow falling on the cement, the Da
The first time you see a 30-foot king cake float roll past Mel's Drive-In with a Grammy winner playing two hundred yards away, you understand what Universal Orlando figured out decades before its competitors: that a theme park doesn't have to fight for your evening if it just bec
The topiary Goofy goes up before the orchids do. Cast members start staging the giant character frames near Spaceship Earth in late February, and by the time the first outdoor kitchen rolls open its shutters, EPCOT has quietly transformed into something closer to a state fair wit
The Festival of the Arts has always been the Disney festival for people who don't really want to do Disney. It runs through the dead weeks of January and February when the parks are otherwise running on holiday fumes, the crowds are thinner than they will be all year, and the wea
By the second week of September, the Universal Orlando Resort starts running on two clocks. There is the daytime park — families with strollers, the Hogwarts Express on a normal cadence, churros at three in the afternoon — and there is the version that materializes after the hous
The first sign Food & Wine season has arrived at EPCOT isn't a banner or a press release — it's the smell of grilled lamb drifting from the Australia booth somewhere near the bridge between Mexico and Norway, hitting you before you've even cleared the tap-stiles. Annual passh