Today I woke to rain. I was not happy. As I ate my breakfast it rained harder and then turned into proper Florida rain. We decided to invoke our rainy-day plan. This involved firstly heading up to the International Drive Outlets as Neil had something he wanted to return to one of the stores.
It was our first outing in what was now ‘Trumpland’ again. The polls had got it horribly wrong and the Donald had won all the votes easily. The recriminations with the Democrat party had already started. I think it was more of a rejection of not wanting the same policies for another term rather than a vote for Trump himself.
We left around 11am when the rain was coming to an end, but came across our first accident of the day before had even left the estate as the exit was almost blocked with the aftermath of a ‘fender bender’ on Funie Steed Road. Our drive progressed well after that until we half way up the i4 when we were caught in the traffic caused by the second ‘fender bender’, this time two cars were strewn across two carriageways. After a 15-minute delay we eventually got passed this hold up and made our way to the outlet’s car park.
Karen & I made our way to the Old Navy store before having a wander around the Columbia store. Then Karen got herself a coffee from Starbucks whilst we waited for Neil to complete his shopping. We chose to get some lunch from the Food Court before moving on. Neil & I both had a stromboli whilst Karen had a slice of pizza.
Then we drove the short distance to the Orlando Auto Museum at Dezerland. I had bought VIP tickets from Groupon for this but Neil was sceptical to say the least about visiting.
Dezerland turned out to be an old shopping mall bought by Michael Dezer for $20 million to house his car collection. I had never heard of him but it seemed he was a multi billionaire property developer now in his 80’s (who was also an early business partner of a certain Mr Trump). It seems Michael Dezer likes to collect cars and has over 3000 of them worth far more than $300 million. His collection of James Bond Cars alone is worth over $100 million.
Dezerland also housed a go kart track, bars and indoor putting course amongst other things.
We had a quick wander around before our VIP tour started. We came across the world’s largest collection of Vespa’s and the worlds longest limo (complete with its own hot tub and helicopter pad) amongst other things.
All the cars were pristine and for a proper petrol head would have blown their minds. The tour was interesting but not in a geekish way. The main reason for paying the extra for the VIP tour was that we would be allowed to get into 5 of the cars.
This was good fun and, in the end, won Neil over. It seemed any famous car in the world that he had heard of, then Dezer just went and paid stupid money to buy. The cars we were allowed in were the Scooby Doo Mystery Machine, the original Ghostbusters car, the DeLorean used in Back to the Future 2, the Batmobile from the original TV series and finally Oddjobs limo from Goldfinger. It was quite something being allowed in them.
There were many other ‘famous’ cars that piqued my interest, like the Greased Lightning car, the one from The Monkees series, The A team’s van, Christine, Mr Beans mini, the original General Lee from the Dukes of Hazzard along with Daisy Dukes car amongst many others. In the James Bond section, there were cars from every single film as well as the original Norfolk based gyro copter. We were there for a good 2 hours and came away very pleased we had visited.
I cannot imagine though being that rich that you can just go and spend unlimited amounts of money on 3000 cars for what was originally your own private collection. There are loads more that he just doesn’t have on display. The museum is a vanity project as the number of visitors no where near even covers the running costs.
On the way back we came across our final ‘fender bender’ of the day, or at least the aftermath of one. The police were still there and lanes were blocked off but there was no evidence of what had occurred previously but it still added 20 minutes to our journey back.
After a quick turnaround we headed out again to Saltgrass Steak House as it was again Karen’s unofficial ‘birthday’ and we had $25 to spend on her Landry’s card, plus I had a $50 gift card which I had purchased for $40 through Groupon. We were seated immediately. The steaks here are so good and we all agreed they just melted in our mouths. We recalled that last time we were in this restaurant that Neil said he was contemplating decorating his lounge in the same western style. Thankfully he didn’t.
Finally, after filling up with petrol, we called into Publix to get some bread rolls to take with us tomorrow and some more breakfast cereals. Then we headed back to the villa to watch some more Shark Tank before retiring for the night.
