Travel Guide

Posts Tagged ‘Florida’

The largest city in the entire state of Florida is Jacksonville. While most tourists usually head toward the beaches of Miami or for the theme parks of Orlando, Jacksonville has plenty of attractions to offer tourists that you won’t find anywhere else. For one thing, they have the largest system of urban parks with over 80,000 acres spread across 337 city parks.  One of their most notable parks is the Jacksonville Arboretum & Gardens, which features many of the flowers and greenery that’s native to the area. Another great park in Jacksonville is Hemming Plaza, which is the oldest city park and is located in downtown. Here are a few more reasons to plan a fun family trip in Jacksonville!

Jacksonville Maritime Museum- This small museum showcases both the history and culture of Jacksonville’s maritime life. Both you and your children should find this gallery fascinating, as they show small replicas of historical sailing vessels and airplanes. Don’t forget to check out their gift shop, which sells a variety of books and gifts all pertaining to Jacksonville’s maritime.  A piece of advice: bring cash as the shop doesn’t accept credit cards. Read the rest of this entry »

Daytona Beach, Florida having an identity crisis? Indeed – the place in our dreams has beaches miles long, all-day sunshine, and surf, but it’s going through a makeover. While you can’t see it everywhere, this town, after years of being the number one Spring Break destination, is trying to upgrade its image. Spring Break in Florida is now officially up north – in Panama City Beach. For some, that’s good news. For others, not so good – low revenues. But for you as a beach lover, Daytona Beach, Florida, is one of the funnest beaches we’ve found on all our journeys. You can actually drive your car right on the sand here.

And do they have the beaches. Here we found 23 miles of wide beaches with hard-packed sand – and 18 of those miles are open to automobile traffic. That’s what put Daytona on the map – beach driving! Remember those old black and white shows on TV with the cars racing along the ocean shore. It all started here. And continues!

Daytona Beach has become synonymous with Spring Break, so much so that MTV has come here since the ’80’s to broadcast from the beach and gave us the impression that Daytona Beach was one huge oceanside Animal House. Even though they still come in the thousands, the peak was in 1989, when over 400,000 students showed up. With only 20,000 hotel rooms – you do the math. Some locals cared only about the fun and money, with money taking a front seat. Others saw their precious Daytona going to the dogs. Read the rest of this entry »

Gigi has looked forward to our return to the states probably more than all of us (maybe combined), looking forward to swimming, playing at the beach, and for the past several months Gigi has counted down the days until she was going to swim with the dolphins. Somewhere along the way we agreed to a trip to Disney World as well…so for an 8 year old girl Florida is next door to heaven.

Dolphin Tricks

We all look forward to “Field Trips”, substituting getting out and seeing, touch, and exploring sights instead of reading about them in a book or studying other not as fun subjects. To this end we were all looking forward to our Dolphin Field Trip, a chance to learn about these amazing creatures and get a firsthand experience with them.

There are a number of places that you can swim with the dolphins in Florida, we chose the Dolphin Research Center in Grassy Key Florida, about 45 minutes South of Key Largo. The DRC is a non-profit education and research facility whose mission is to Read the rest of this entry »