Rebecca Engel
The theme parks sit southwest of Orlando, clustered along a few miles of road that most visitors never leave. They’re very good at what they do. They’re also a twenty minute drive and an entirely different city away from the place Orlando actually is.
That city has a chapel built for the 1893 World’s Fair, a river of 68 degree spring water you can float down on an inner tube, and a Vietnamese food district with better noodles than anywhere else in the state. Here are 21 things to do in Orlando that don’t involve a park ticket, a wristband, or a single minute in a queue.
1. Float Down Rock Springs At Kelly Park
Rock Springs comes out of the ground in Apopka at a steady 68 degrees and runs about a mile through the woods before it flattens out. You rent an inner tube, walk up to the top, sit down in the water, and let it carry you back. Then you do it again.
It’s the closest thing Central Florida has to a natural lazy river, and it’s a county park, so it costs a few dollars a car rather than a few hundred.
The catch is capacity. Kelly Park caps how many people it lets in each day to protect the spring run, and on a warm weekend it can fill by mid morning. There’s a phone line that tells you whether the gate is still open, and locals treat getting there before nine as the price of admission.
Bring a tube or rent one from the shops just outside the entrance. Bring cash too, and food, because once you’re in you won’t want to leave to find lunch.
2. Swim The Spring At Wekiwa Springs State Park
Fifteen minutes from Kelly Park, Wekiwa Springs does the same trick in a different shape. There’s no tubing run here. What there is instead is a wide swimming hole where the spring surfaces, held at 72 degrees every day of the year, with a sandy bottom and a shallow end that families camp out in all afternoon.
The better reason to come is the paddling. You can rent a kayak or a canoe at the concession and head up the Wekiva River, which is narrow, green, and quiet enough that turtles don’t bother sliding off their logs when you pass.
Thirteen miles of trail run through the pine flatwoods behind the spring if you’d rather stay dry. Black bears live out there, which sounds alarming and mostly means you should keep your cooler shut.
3. Look For Manatees At Blue Spring State Park
About forty five minutes north of downtown, Blue Spring pushes out water at a constant 72 degrees, and every winter that makes it the warmest room in the neighborhood. When the St. Johns River turns cold, manatees crowd into the spring run by the hundreds and stay until it warms back up.
Manatee season runs from mid November through the end of March. During those months the water is closed to swimmers and the whole park becomes a boardwalk you walk slowly along, looking down at animals the size of small cars doing absolutely nothing.
Outside that window it flips. The manatees leave, the spring reopens for swimming and snorkeling, and you get a gorgeous blue swimming hole with hardly anyone in it. Either version is worth the drive. They’re just completely different days out.
4. Paddle The Headwaters Of The Everglades At Shingle Creek
Everyone knows the Everglades are in South Florida. Almost nobody knows they start in Kissimmee, in a cypress lined creek about fifteen minutes from the busiest stretch of tourist highway in the state.
Shingle Creek is the northernmost source of the water that eventually becomes the Everglades, and you can put a kayak on it. The paddle is slow and shaded, with cypress knees poking up through tea colored water and herons lifting off ahead of the boat.
There’s a paddling center on the creek that rents kayaks and runs guided trips, which is the easy way to do it if you don’t want to think about launch points. Go early. Afternoons in summer bring thunderstorms with real conviction.
5. Take The Winter Park Scenic Boat Tour
This one has been running since 1938 and it has never needed to change. A small pontoon boat leaves Lake Osceola every hour, a guide who has clearly given this talk ten thousand times narrates it, and for the next hour you go through a chain of lakes connected by narrow canals dug back when Winter Park was a winter resort for people escaping northern cold.
The canals are the good part. They’re barely wider than the boat, roofed over with cypress and moss, and cool enough that the temperature drops a few degrees as you go under.
The rest is lakefront mansions, the Rollins College campus, and a running commentary on who owns what. It costs about the same as two movie tickets and it’s the single most pleasant hour in Orange County.
6. See The Tiffany Chapel At The Morse Museum
Louis Comfort Tiffany built a chapel interior for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It’s now in a museum in Winter Park, four blocks from a Starbucks, and there is nothing about that sentence that sounds true.
The Morse holds the most complete collection of Tiffany’s work anywhere, which means his glass and lamps and jewelry and paintings, plus whole rooms salvaged from Laurelton Hall, his Long Island estate, after it burned in 1957.
The chapel is the reason to come. It’s a dim room with a mosaic altar and a glass chandelier shaped like a crown, and people go quiet when they walk in without anyone telling them to.
It’s small enough to see properly in ninety minutes. Check the hours before you go, since it isn’t open every day.
7. Spend A Morning On Park Avenue In Winter Park
Park Avenue is the street the Morse and the boat tour both sit on, so most people end up here anyway. It’s worth treating as its own stop.
The short version: brick sidewalks, live oaks, a long row of independent shops and restaurants, and Central Park running the whole length of one side with a fountain and a rose garden in it. On Saturday mornings a farmers market takes over the old train depot at the south end.
It reads more like a small New England town that got warm than anything you’d expect twenty minutes from a monorail. Sit outside somewhere, order something, and give it an hour.
8. Catch A Film At The Enzian In Maitland
The Enzian is a single screen nonprofit theater under the oak trees in Maitland, and it works nothing like a multiplex. You sit at a table, a server brings you food and a drink during the film, and the programming runs to independent and foreign releases rather than whatever opened that Friday.
It also runs the Florida Film Festival every spring, which pulls in directors and premieres and turns a quiet suburb into a genuine film town for ten days.
Even on an ordinary Tuesday it’s a good night out. Book ahead, because the room is small and the regulars know it.
9. Pedal A Swan Boat Around Lake Eola
Lake Eola is the round lake in the middle of downtown with the fountain in it, and it’s the closest thing Orlando has to a town square. A paved path runs just under a mile around the edge, past a bandshell, a Chinese pagoda, and a population of actual swans that have been here longer than most residents.
The pedal powered swan boats are the thing people remember. They’re slow, they’re a little ridiculous, and floating in the middle of the lake at dusk with the downtown towers lit up behind the fountain is a genuinely lovely twenty minutes.
Come on a Sunday if you can. The farmers market sets up along the southeast side from mid morning through the afternoon, which turns a walk around the lake into lunch.
10. Spend A Morning At Harry P. Leu Gardens
Fifty acres of gardens on Lake Rowena, three miles from downtown, given to the city in 1961 by a man who spent decades bringing plants home from his travels.
The camellia collection is the standout and it’s one of the largest in the eastern United States, with a couple hundred varieties that bloom from late October through March. That happens to be the stretch when Orlando’s weather is at its best, so the timing works out.
There’s a rose garden, a butterfly garden, a bamboo grove that feels like a different continent, and the old Leu family house open for tours. Two hours is about right. Bring water and a hat, because Florida shade only does so much.
11. See The Folk Art At The Mennello Museum
The Mennello is a small museum on Lake Formosa built around the paintings of Earl Cunningham, a self taught Florida folk artist who ran a curio shop in St. Augustine and painted harbors in colors no harbor has ever been.
His work is joyful and strange and the permanent collection is the largest anywhere. The rotating exhibitions bring in other American folk and outsider artists alongside it.
It takes an hour, the sculpture garden out back runs down to the lake, and it sits in Loch Haven Park next door to two other museums, so it’s easy to stack a whole afternoon here.
12. Spend A Rainy Afternoon At The Orlando Science Center
Orlando rains hard most summer afternoons, usually around three, usually for about an hour. The Science Center is what locals do with that hour.
Four floors of it, in the same Loch Haven Park cluster as the Mennello. There’s a full dinosaur hall, a live alligator and turtle exhibit downstairs, a hands on physics floor that kids treat as a playground, and a giant domed theater showing science films.
It’s aimed at families and it doesn’t pretend otherwise, but the observatory on the top floor opens for public telescope viewing on clear Friday nights, which is worth knowing about whether or not you have kids in tow.
13. Catch A Show At The Dr. Phillips Center
Downtown got a proper performing arts center about a decade ago and it changed what a night out in Orlando looks like. Touring Broadway shows come through, along with the Orlando Philharmonic, the ballet, comedians, and touring musicians.
The building’s best room is Steinmetz Hall, an acoustic hall that can physically reconfigure itself for different kinds of performance and is regularly called one of the best sounding rooms in the country.
Tickets run the full range, and the plaza out front usually has something free happening on it in the evening even if you don’t go inside.
14. Eat Your Way Down Mills 50
Mills 50 takes its name from the intersection of Mills Avenue and Highway 50, and it’s the best eating in the city. Vietnamese families who came to Orlando after the war settled here in the 1970s and built a district that people still call Little Saigon.
That means banh mi, pho, and bun bo hue up and down the street, plus Thai, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese places filling in around them, and a bakery or two that will sell you a coffee strong enough to end a conversation.
The neighborhood has picked up a wall of murals over the last decade and a run of bars and coffee shops alongside the restaurants. Park once and walk. The good stuff is dense here in a way it isn’t anywhere else in Orlando.
15. Graze Through East End Market In Audubon Park
East End Market is a two story food hall in a converted building in Audubon Park, and it’s small enough that you can see the whole thing from the door. That’s the appeal. A dozen or so vendors, all local, none of them a chain.
There’s a fishmonger, a cheese counter, a bakery, a plant shop, and a handful of counters doing full meals, including a ramen shop that people drive across the county for.
The surrounding neighborhood is worth the extra twenty minutes. Audubon Park has a strip of independent shops and coffee places along Corrine Drive, and a community market that takes over the market’s own lot on Monday evenings.
16. Spend A Night In The Milk District
The Milk District got its name from the dairy that’s been on the corner since the 1920s, and it’s where Orlando goes out when it doesn’t want anything polished.
It’s a few blocks of dive bars, late night food, a beloved sandwich counter, a record store, and a couple of venues that book bands you’ll hear about a year later. Nothing here is trying to be a destination, which is exactly why it is one.
Things run late. A lot of the neighborhood’s regulars work service jobs at the parks and start their evening when yours would be ending.
17. Hunt Through Antique Row On North Orange Avenue
North Orange Avenue through Ivanhoe Village is lined with antique dealers, and it has been for decades. Mid century furniture, estate jewelry, old Florida postcards, records, and a great deal of genuine junk sitting next to genuinely good pieces.
It’s browsing rather than shopping. Prices swing wildly between shops and half the fun is the swing.
The strip has filled in around the antiques with coffee shops, a brewery or two, and Lake Ivanhoe at the end of it, so it holds an afternoon even if you don’t buy a thing.
18. Ride The West Orange Trail Into Winter Garden
Winter Garden is a citrus town on the south shore of Lake Apopka that spent the last twenty years turning its old main street into one of the nicest downtowns in Central Florida. Plant Street has brick, awnings, antique shops, a food hall in an old building, and a farmers market on Saturday mornings.
The West Orange Trail runs about twenty two miles on a former rail bed and goes straight through the middle of it, which is the fun way to arrive. Rent a bike at either end, ride in, eat lunch, ride back.
If you’d rather drive, it’s half an hour from downtown Orlando and there’s parking off Plant Street. The trail is flat the entire way, which in Florida is not exactly a boast.
19. Browse The Antique Shops In Mount Dora
Mount Dora sits on a lake about forty minutes northwest of Orlando, on ground high enough by Florida standards that the town made a hill part of its name.
It’s built for a slow afternoon. Antique shops and dealers fill the small downtown, there’s a lakefront with a boardwalk and boat tours out onto the Harris Chain, and the whole place tips into full festival mode several times a year for art shows and antique fairs.
Come on a weekday if crowds bother you. Come on a festival weekend if they don’t, because that’s when the town is at its best.
20. Meet The Alligators At Gatorland
Gatorland opened in 1949, which makes it older than every theme park in the state, and it has cheerfully refused to become one. It’s 110 acres of alligators, crocodiles, a breeding marsh, an aviary, and a petting zoo, with a giant open gator mouth as the front gate.
It calls itself the Alligator Capital of the World and the sign has been there long enough to have earned it. There’s a zip line that runs over the breeding marsh, feeding shows, and a boardwalk through a cypress swamp where wild birds nest above thousands of gators because nothing can reach them up there.
It’s cheap by Orlando standards and it takes half a day. This is the roadside Florida that existed before anyone thought to build a castle here.
21. Stand Under A Saturn V At Kennedy Space Center
An hour east of Orlando, on the coast, is the place the moon landings actually left from. The visitor complex at Kennedy Space Center is a working spaceport’s front door rather than an attraction someone invented.
The Saturn V hanging in the Apollo building is the whole trip. It’s an actual unflown rocket, 363 feet of it, lying on its side over your head, and no photograph has ever managed to convey the scale of the thing.
There’s also the shuttle Atlantis, still scorched from reentry, bus tours out to the launch pads, and astronauts who come in to talk to visitors. Give it a full day.
Check the launch schedule before you pick a date. Private companies fly out of here constantly now, and watching a rocket go up is free from any beach on the coast if you time it right.
A Few More Things To Do In Orlando Away From The Parks
Bok Tower Gardens is an hour south, a 205 foot bell tower on one of the highest points in peninsular Florida, with a carillon that plays daily and gardens designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. It’s quiet and strange and almost nobody in Orlando has been.
The Audubon Center for Birds of Prey in Maitland rehabilitates injured hawks, owls, and eagles, and the ones that can’t be released live there. It’s small, it’s cheap, and you get closer to a bald eagle than you ever will otherwise.
The Orange County Regional History Center downtown is in the old courthouse and covers the state from the Timucua through the citrus boom to the day the parks arrived. Worth an hour for context on everything else here.
And Orlando Wetlands Park out in Christmas is a working water treatment marsh that happens to be one of the best birding sites in the state. Free, flat, and full of alligators.
Final Thoughts
The best things to do in Orlando mostly sit outside the resort corridor, and the gap between the two is bigger than most visitors ever find out.
Twenty minutes in one direction gets you a spring that holds 72 degrees in January. Twenty minutes in another gets you the most complete collection of Tiffany glass on earth. An hour east is the pad the Apollo missions launched from. None of that was built to entertain anyone, which is most of the appeal.
Rent a car. Orlando is spread out and its transit isn’t built for this kind of trip, and nearly everything on this list is a twenty minute to one hour drive from a hotel. That car is the difference between seeing a park and seeing a city.
