living like lulu

Celebration, Florida

My friend, Brittanie, and I were driving through Florida on our way from the east coast to the west coast of the state.  Now, if you have driven through Central Florida, I am sure that you can attest that there is very little to look forward to –either the chain-laden sprawl of Orlando or swampland and more swampland.  Don't get me wrong, I find swamps very pretty in their own way, but the Floridian version of swampland is not so much.  I know it has very important functions for the ecology (something that most Floridians are only coming to understand), but seriously, the road trip across the state is dullsville.

So what is a girl to do?  Find an adventure.  Or a reasonable facsimile of one.

Celebration, Florida is a planned community outside of Orlando.  It was built by Disney, and let me tell you, it seems like you drove into a Disney movie from the early days of picket fences, wrap-around porches, and perfectly groomed yards where you expect PollyAnna to be frolicking.

Now, most people would feel a certain nostalgia for a homey place like Celebration, and perhaps stop the car and walk down the street to a chorus of "good mornings" from the overly friendly citizens of the town.  Not us.  We were frightened.  But that didn't make us leave.

As we drove around, I pulled out the video camera, as I didn't think anyone would believe us that this place existed.  I had originally heard of Celebration on NPR about a year before our visit, but I still doubted that anyone would believe that a place this perfect could exist.  A woman rode around on a bike, with a basket on the front.  We saw her again and again.  She was wearing a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt, and get this, she had a puppy in the basket.  I mean, really!  When we turned a corner, we saw a nuclear family playing football in their front yard.  We started to suspect a conspiracy.

The downtown area of Celebration was currently shut off to traffic – for a pie festival!

Birds were peacefully grazing in parks.  I assumed they were the same animatronic birds that Disney used on the Jungle Cruise ride.  The woman-puppy combo was paid to ride around all day.  And the football family was cued as to our approach by some central control office that told them to commence playing just for our observation.

We did find the fly in the Celebration ointment when we tried to leave town -- wait, or did we?  Was it more of the Celebration plan?  The roads all led to the back of the development, and they end in more swampland.  It took us quite a while to wind our way through the streets that had only empty houses.  But those houses looked exactly the same as the houses closer to the center of the town.  Was it meant to confuse and disorient visitors so that they finally gave up, bought a house, and ate huckleberry pie?

We eventually backtracked, and found our way out of Celebration.  It was a scary half-hour, but we calmed each other down by imagining Hedwig from Hedwig and the Angry Inch moving there.  We actually developed a whole screenplay in that thirty minutes.  Let me know if you are interested in developing it, and you have the right connections.  wink.