ORLANDO, Fla. -- If you spent eight hours a day taking in the attractions in Orlando, Fla., and spent an average amount of time at each one, it would take 41.1 days to see everything.
That number comes from the Convention and Visitors Bureau, a biased source, but I think it might actually be an understatement. In coming up with 41.1 days, the bureau considered only theme parks, tourist attractions, cultural events, museums, dinner theaters, entertainment complexes, water parks, wildlife refuges and zoos.That means it did not include America's Largest Factory Outlet Center (Belz, with 170 stores) or the hundreds of other discount clothing and souvenir shops that line every busy street in the metro area.
Nor did it include any of the 3,886 restaurants where hungry families wait in long lines for a costly moment at the trough.
If you wanted to eat or shop, you would have to add a couple more weeks to the total. By my calculation, to truly cover the ground, 54 eight-hour days might be enough, if you didn't take weekends off.
In a nutshell, that is the joy and the horror of Orlando, a place entirely contrived for the pleasure of people on vacation (and the profits derived from those visitors). Along with more than 38 million others this year, I made a pilgrimage to the capital city of American mass tourism.
During four 12-hour days, I went on rides and experienced special effects that made my hair stand on end. I saw Mickey Mouse make children very happy and parents very tired. I saw giant alligators make leaping grabs of raw chickens. I saw a Mona Lisa made of 1,426 cubes of toast and a Rolls Royce made of 1,016,711 matchsticks. I shopped at outlet malls. But most of all, I stood in lines that all ended at cash registers.
Are we there yet?
For visitors, Orlando has two faces. One is very ugly. If you choose to stay inside Disney World, you might never see it.
I, however, stayed at a cheap, comfortable motel ($35 a night) with a pool and a chunk of tranquil lakeshore on Hwy. 192 in Kissimmee, south of Orlando. It was a 20-minute drive from Walt Disney World, and it was right on one of the busiest tourist thoroughfares in town.
All along 192 and International Drive, the car rules. There are lots of parking lots, and lots of bright signs and lights. The air is heavy and dirty with exhaust. Every 100 yards is something guaranteed to make kids scream to stop: a giant building shaped like an orange, pirate-themed mini-golf courses, cut-rate Disney souvenir stands. Every time I wanted to do something other than go to Disney World -- to eat, to shop, to see another site -- I had to run that gauntlet. As a result, I spent an average of two hours a day in my rental car in traffic.
The flip side of that mess is why 38 million people come to Orlando each year. Once you pass through the gates at Disney, or Universal, or any of the other tourist attractions, you're in a controlled environment, where your needs are catered to and your senses titillated.
It just takes money to get inside. And you might have to wait in line to get there.
Gatorland
It was my lucky day. There was no line outside Gatorland. But there was a cash register. It cost $17 to get in.
Inside the 100-acre park, boardwalks frame pits filled with alligators. These truly native Florida attractions have been here, unchanged, for about 65 million years.
I went on a stroll and took in the sights. A couple of 12-footers, with rolls of fat around their necks, lounged by the edge of one pool. Another pond was aswirl with young, frisky gators. Behind glass, I could see rows of aquariums full of footlong baby gators. The enclosure with giant African crocodiles had a plane crashed in it, with a few personal effects strewn about to give the impression someone had just been eaten.
I caught the tail end of the ""Jungle Crocs of the World"" educational talk, after which kids got to throw chunks of meat to the beasts.
Gatorland is the dinosaur of tourist entertainment in central Florida. It celebrates 50 years in business this year and started out when just having a pond full of flesh-ripping reptiles was enough to pull families off the road. Now Gatorland offers entertainment, education, shopping, a little train ride and an aviary, but at the heart of it, the appeal of Gatorland still is giant flesh-ripping reptiles.
Keys to the Kingdom
The Magic Kingdom, at 28 years, is the oldest part of Disney's immense Florida empire, which covers 43 square miles of land south and west of Orlando proper. It started the tourism boom that transformed the town from a citrus-grove backwater to the No. 1 ""domestic leisure"" destination in the United States.
To get to the heart of Disney's appeal, I signed up for the ""Keys to the Kingdom"" tour, which promises an inside look at how the magic is made.
Scott Zagalak was our guide. Rosy-cheeked, well-groomed and cheery to a fault, he made an ideal Mouseketeer. If he hadn't had a perpetually runny nose punctuated by explosive sneezes, his perfection would have been irksome. Zagalak began by explaining something about Disney's corporate philosophy. The key acronym, he said, is TEAM -- ""Together Everyone Achieves Magic."" To that end, employees are taught to view themselves as part of an ensemble cast.
""I'm not an employee,"" he said. ""I'm a cast member. I don't have a job, I have a role.""
We started the tour on Main Street, the entrance to the Magic Kingdom. Zagalak explained how every detail was painstakingly arranged to make visitors feel good. From the moment we got in line outside the park, where we got a tantalizing glimpse of Cinderella's Castle, we were being subtly manipulated, he said.
""The sidewalks and streets are different colors to help guests perceive depth,"" he said. ""All through the Magic Kingdom, you'll find the doors are open -- even though it costs more to air-condition them that way. It makes the shops seem more welcoming. Our surveys found that guests would walk an average of 15 feet out of their way to a garbage can. So every 15 feet in the kingdom, you'll find a garbage can.""
At the end of the street, he asked us to take a deep breath. The air was heavy with the smell of baking chocolate chip cookies.
He pointed to a grate above the door of the Main Street Bake Shop. ""The smell is piped out from that grate, and I'll let you in on a little secret. There aren't always cookies baking in there,"" he said. ""But it's very effective. We found that one in 15 guests will buy a cookie on Main Street by the end of the day.""
Zagalak proceeded to take us through the theme park on an exhaustive five-hour tour.
A made-up place
During the rest of my travels in non-Disney Orlando, I hit a lot of different spots.
The range of possibilities is staggering. At one end, you have the Mary, Queen of the Universe Shrine, which is a Catholic parish set up for Orlando tourists. I found it to be a quiet and peaceful refuge from the carnival of thrills and materialism all around it. At the other, you have the side-show attractions at Ripley's Believe It Or Not, where you can see the Wang, the human unicorn (OK, a model of Wang, the human unicorn), plus a pair of pants made of human hair and lots of shrunken heads.
I saw all of China's big tourist sites -- painstakingly re-created in miniature -- at the Splendid China theme park.
But maybe the most telling thing I saw was Celebration, the Disney-built Orlando suburb that boasts a tidy, pedestrian-friendly business district, with a movie theater, ice cream parlor and Italian restaurant along the shore of a beautiful lake. The homes are built close together to foster a neighborhood feeling and to make it easier to get around.
It was so different from the rest of Orlando that I caught myself thinking, ""This is almost like a real place.""
Then I noticed a souvenir stand, tastefully built into one of the storefront buildings, stocked with Celebration mugs and T-shirts.
I was still in Orlando.