Travel Blog

The first I spent in Winter Park, driving past live oaks dripping Spanish moss, admiring the collection of Tiffany glass in the Morse Museum, strolling Park Avenue and passing the occasional lawyer (or banker) in coat and tie. The only disappointment was that the bookstore I remembered from my last visit - about ten years years ago - was gone. Bookstores not only sold books, they provided a refuge, a place where someone looking to kill time could happily lose himself in the pages of a poetry or essay collection. In the evening I returned with Hania (who had spent the day in training) and we had a delicious small plate dinner at Prato - polenta, roasted eggplant soup, gluten-free pasta - as light from the setting sun filtered through the trees of the park and gave the restaurant an evanescent glow. By the time darkness fell we were sitting with the Italian party at the neighboring table, chatting happily as Amtrak's Silver Meteor pulled into the station across the park.

Yesterday morning I headed into downtown and visited the library, which had some lovely black-and-white photographs of the pre-Disney city. In the used bookstore on the third floor I bought Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings and a Rosa Passos CD. I drove - to the sounds of "Chega de Saudade" - to Colonial Drive, where I wandered in and out of pungent Vietnamese grocery stores. Then I made my way to Thornton Park and found all the restaurants I remembered plus a few new ones, but the bookstore had been replaced by a kind of arts cafe. Thank God I had a book.