Sunday October 23rd 2016

It was a beautiful day in central Florida. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky all day. The temperature topped out around 80 starting from a low in the 50s this morning. The humidity and temperature is supposed to increase every day this week.

River separating Town Center from The Landing

I went to Disney Springs this afternoon. I wanted to check out the new Town Center section in a little more detail and do some general people watching. The traffic getting there wasn’t to bad. One thing that helps is Disney has built bus lanes into the median of Buena Vista Drive. Keeping them out of the main traffic flow really helps.

The first surprise at the Springs was the on-going construction on the Observatory. The conversion of Planet Hollywood into the Observatory must be behind schedule. It looked like they had full crews working on the exterior with more people inside the building. The other construction areas in the Landing section of the Springs did not have any workers present. I imagine they want the Observatory restaurant open for the holidays.
The crowds were very heavy for a beautiful Sunday afternoon. I didn’t expect it to be such a popular place on a weekend afternoon. There was also a great deal of security present. Disney security was in blue and the local sheriffs in green. I’m used to seeing one or two of each during a typical visit, but today they were at every corner in pairs with singles walking the grounds. Nothing was reported on the evening news, but it seemed to be an unusually heavy presence.

I spent about 2.5 hours walking around and checking out the shops. I successfully resisted the urge to buy anything not even any food. The new stores in Town Center are higher end places. They are some of the same names you see at outlet malls except these don’t pretend to have discounted prices. Some of the names I recognized are Tommy Bahama, Columbia Sportswear and Under Armour Brand House. Others like Uniqlo seem to have an Asian origin. Uniqlo is apparently a Japanese clothing store.

I didn’t pay much attention to the restaurants. The couple of menus I looked at had medium to high priced entries listed. You had to read the description to get a clue about the content of the meal. Usually the name will clue you in on the general category (pasta, meat, fish,…) but not some of these dishes. Disney has needed more restaurants that aren’t in the theme parks. I think they have filled that need.

The New England Patriots game was on TV at 4:30 so I rushed back home. I don’t want to miss an opportunity to watch the Pats when they are on the national broadcast. I miss be able to watch all of their games on TV. Down here they get the show the Dolphins, Jaguars or Bucs games. It doesn’t look like Orlando broadcast market has been designated the home area for any specific one of those teams by the NFL.