USA Travel Guide

USA - Places of Interest

Hawaii	Las Vegas	Los Angles
Miami	New York	Orlando
San Francisco	Washington

CANADA - Places of Interest

Alaska	Montreal	Ottawa
Toronto	Niagara	Vancouver

ORLANDO

The Mickey Mouse draw card has turned Orlando into the third-ranking US destination for overseas travellers, after Los Angeles and New York City. The city ‘built on the peel of an orange’ has also established itself as part of Florida’s high-tech corridor.

While everybody knows the big-name theme parks – you’ve spawned smaller versions in most of our home countries – the treasures of Orlando’s psyche are the sidekicks: Holyland is pending God; reige’s Firearms rent out real semi automatics for a blast; and and Skull Kingdom is endearingly low-tech.

Orlando boasts not only the space technology industries focused on the Florida Space Coast but a healthy dose of bits and bytes makers as well. So you’d better watch your step in this 21st century boomtown: according to a 1998 study, the stampede to Oriando has made it the most dangerous place in the US for pedestrians.

The biggest city in central Florida, Oriando is dominated by Lake Eola in its northeastern downtown quadrant. The most famous downtown icon is Church Street Station, a collection of restaurants, bars and shops located between 1-4 and the railroad tracks. Orlando is 6km (4mi) from Universal Studios, 16km (10mi) from Sea World, an 32 km (20mi) from Walt Disney World, all located southwest of downtown in an area appropriately known as the Tourist Quarter.

ATTRACTIONS

Disney World
This is a self-contained city. Apart from the four main parks (Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Disney-MGM Studios and Animal Kingdom), there are three water parks, a shopping district 22, hotels, countless eateries, a police force, transport systems, medical centres, even kennels for the pooch. Watch out for the mouse.

In its first year, Disney World saw over 10 million visitors, and it remains one of the world’s top tourist destinations, now attracting more than 20 million visitors a year. It’s also the world’s biggest amusement resort, covering an area twice the size of New York’s Manhattan. It has its own transport system, emergency services, police force, energy plant and more than 20,000 employees. It would have made Wall very, very happy

Universal Studios Florida
So you want to be in pictures and the only offers you’ve had are for ‘experimental’ films made by creeps”? Then Universal Studios may be more your style, a place to live out your wildest film screen fantasies while remaining fully clothed.

Like Universal Studios in Hollywood , Orlando’s Universal Studios is a combination working movie studio and theme park. What this means essentially is that you can admire stars from afar and live vicariously through them.

Some of the best attractions for relieving star-envy include Terminator 2:3D, a spectacular 3D simulator experience where you get to be Arnold: Back to the Future, which has phenomenal special effects; and Earthquake – The Big One, which hits 8.3 on the Richter scale. Popular shows include the Animal Actors, Dynamite Nights Stuntacular, Ghostbusters and the Universal Horror Makeup Show. The Hitchcock 3D Theater is a tribute to the master of suspense.

Kennedy Space Center
To some people, the finest words ever spoken by an American were Neil Armstrong’s One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’ spoken as he became the first man to walk on the moon in 1969. Since then, we Earthlings have had a longstanding love affairs with space travel and the scientists who make it possible. There’s no better place to stand in awe of the ‘right stuff’ than the Kennedy Space Center, off the coast of central Florida.

The centre draws 2 million people a year to its Gallery of Spaceflight, packed with real spacecraft and scale models. It was established in 1958, when the National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) started Project Mercury to complete with the Soviets’ successful launch of Sputnik. The US started launching its spaceships from Cape Canaveral, a stone’s throw the Kenddedy Space Center< because of its weather , its proximity to the ocean (for splash landings) and the huge, unpopulated tracts of land available to the government for testing. Mercury was succeeded by Project Gemini, then Project Apollo, which landed a man on the moon. The Space Coasts still maintains facilities for unmanned as space shuttle launches.

Titusville, the main gateway to the Kennedy Space Center and the Wildlife refuge, hots the Astronaut Hall of Fame, dedicated to exhibiting every detil of the astronauts’ lives and boasting a shuttle-landing simulator ride and G-force trainer. Titusville also have excellent vantage points from which to watch shuttle launches.

The Kennedy Space Center is on Merritt Island, on the eastern side of the Intracoastal Waterway) called Indian River here). The NASA Causeway is the main east-west thoroughfare and begins at the junction of Highway 405 and Highway 1. The Banana River separates the main Kennedy Space Center complex from Cape Canaveral, the site of the first launches of the US space program. You’ll need to car to get to the Space Coast. Greyhound buses only get as close as Titusville, 7 miles )11 km) west of the Space Center, off Highway 405.

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