Orlando

Back in America and watching the Superbowl in our huge condo resort house near Disneyland. Things could not be much different from South America. Our trip back here was uneventful, we really have been lucky with all our flights and general travel on this trip.
We have ended up in a resort which is about 15min from the gates of Disney. Not very far but far enough that the price drops considerably from the actual Disney resorts and for less than $100 a night we are getting 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, and all the mod cons in a resort with a huge pool complex including a lazy river.
Today we took the chance to catch up on laundry and generally organise ourselves a bit before heading out to see the delights of Orlando this afternoon. I find myself, like every time I am in America, at odds with myself over how to react to what I see. The consumer culture is epic, the new car yards need postcodes of their own, outlet malls and t-shirt shops compete with fast food joints for every inch of space and there is a general excess of everything that we believe to be bad about America. Yet I always find it exciting and somehow energizing to be here.
The weak American dollar is certainly evident in the Outlet Malls with people loaded with shopping bags speaking with every accent except the local one. We were certainly not immune to the attraction of low prices with $30 Nikes hard to look past.
The scale of accommodation options in Orlando is hard to believe until you actually get here and drive around. We tried valiantly today to find some sort of local housing area but between the time share resort suburbs, huge mega hotels, golf course residential resorts and your normal run of the mill hotel chains there was nowhere we could see that the employee’s of all these places actually lived. I guess they all must come in from further out.
Tomorrow we brave day one of four of Disney and Tammy and I have decided that after seeing the cost of the tickets our previous squeamishness about going on the big rides is going to be over ridden by a need to get our monies worth!