How We Learned Today: Day 25 - Orlando to Clearwater

Miles Driven During the Week in Orlando: 175

Miles Driven Today: 155

Happy Birthday to me! Today is my 35th birthday and I'm so glad Mike was able to spend a little bit of it with me. Although he doesn't have to be back at work for a few days, trying to time our travel locations to coincide with his potential flight options was proving to be difficult, and expensive.

So instead we decided to just spend one more night in Orlando and then schedule his flight for today from the Orlando airport. He got a flight in the early afternoon so we were able to have a birthday breakfast together at Cracker Barrel. We packed everything back into the car and headed to drop him off. After our experience with the small, interesting and efficient Baltimore airport, this was a big change. This airport was huge with tons of stores in it and it was quite crowded. I was able to get one last goodbye photo before he disappeared in the distance.

We checked out a few of the shops in the airport terminal including a Build-A-Bear Workshop that sold stuffed pink flamingos, a Disney store, and a Universal Studios store that sold magic wand replicas of all of the characters in the Harry Potter books.

Voldemort's wand is open in front

Our next planned stop was to head back to Downtown Disney and to revisit the World of Disney store. I got several fun Disney pins for my birthday today as presents, but I wanted to make sure I took some time to look around the store and I wanted to buy some more souvenirs (as did the girls). We found our way to the right area easily this time and also found a parking spot, even though the sign said the lot was full. I got out of the car and it was really hot out, and then suddenly I realized.... my new hat was gone.

I texted Mike in disbelief that I could possibly have lost another hat, but I already knew it was gone since we had torn the car apart this morning while we were packing it. I have no idea what happened to it, and I was so upset that I managed to lose another hat - especially since I had only owned this one for about 6 hours. I visited the information center in the store and the lady there told me I could call the parks' lost and found office and ask if they had it. Unfortunately, they didn't. Another hat gone. And I was really attached to this one, too. :(

We tried to enjoy ourselves shopping anyway and walked down the plaza a bit even though we had been told no other stores sold those hats. The displays at the Lego store were amazing! I wish I would have taken more photos of the displays they had outside. They also had a giant sea monster in the water on the other side of the bridge and an amazing rendition of the Sleeping Beauty dragon attacking the prince on his horse. It was probably about 10 feet tall. This display of the seven dwarves was about 7 feet tall.

Once we were done shopping at Downtown Disney, our next stop was Clearwater Beach on the west coast of Florida. Our plan was to visit the aquarium tomorrow, but for tonight we were just going to see the beach and rest a bit. It was a gorgeous view on the drive out there with much of the freeway being just two lanes with the bay on either side. It was funny to look out the car window and see speedboats racing the cars alongside the road.

We checked into our hotel and then went to visit the beach. Unfortunately, I think everyone else in Western Florida had also come to the beach that night. We found out later that there was some special festival in town this week and we overheard someone say that she had been here last year on the 4th of July and it wasn't even this crowded. After driving around the beach parking lots for almost 45 minutes, we finally found a place to park on the street and made it out to the beach just in time to see the sunset.