Hayley & Shaun in Canada: Orlando & Miami, FL

Orlando June 3rd - June 9th
Miami June 9th - June 15th

We arrived at about 12:30pm on the 3rd of June in Orlando from Washington after an overnight train trip where, again, we had very little sleep. We managed to find a shuttle bus to take us to our hotel in Kissimmee which was a suburb in the greater Orlando area. It had many restaurants and gift shops and things to do within a short walk of the hotel and the hotel itself was quite spread out with two pools and a nice pool bar area which was good for our spare time. It definitely felt like Florida as there were palm trees everywhere!

One of the days in Orlando was spent taking a cheap shuttle bus up and down International Drive which was a very long road with various outlet shopping areas and heaps and heaps of restaurants including about 5 or 6 Denny's, just on the one road! They love the chain restaurants over here! We also found a really awesome Mini-Golf near our hotel that was set up like a Pirate cove, with waterfalls and really nice scenery. We played at night which was really pretty :)

But the main purpose of our trip to Orlando was to visit Universal Studios and Universal Island's of Adventure. Both of the theme parks where in the same area with an area called City Walk in between full of cool restaurants and shops, including Hard Rock Cafe and similar places. We had a 3 day park hopper ticket where we could go between both parks as many times a day as we liked which was handy. Islands of Adventure was more ride-orientated and had some cool rollercoasters. It also had 'The Wizarding World of Harry Potter' where the streets where set up like Hogwarts and all of the shops and decorations were like the Harry Potter town and movie. It was very authentic and they even had the Hogwarts castle where you could go in and walk around and then there was a cool ride inside as well. You could even buy 'butter beer' which turned out to be really yummy - don't worry it's not actually beer! Universal Studios was based more around the making of movies, but they had rides like Jaws and Men in Black, also a 3-D Simpsons ride and a really awesome Rollercoaster that let you choose music to play in your own individual seat as you rode!

Anyways we had a fun three days at Universal, seeing lots of characters and lots of cool shows. The rides were really fun and it was awesome seeing Harry Potter come to life. We enjoyed our hotel too, and it was lucky they had a free shuttle bus to Universal Studios as well!

After Orlando we got back on the Amtrak train for a 5 hour trip to Miami. Unfortunately the train station was a bit out of town so we got a taxi to South Beach to our hostel, South Beach Hostel. The weather was really nice while we were in Miami and we mainly spent our time just relaxing and chilling out. We had a private room at the hostel but unforutnately it was still bunk beds that were really uncomfortable! But the hostel had a laundry, kitchen and breakfast provided. It even had a bar that cheap drinks at Happy hour so that was good too. The hostel was in a pretty good location - only about 2 blocks to the beach and the water was so clear and blue and warm and calm! There was also a much less relaxed dress code at these beaches than what we are used to in Australia, if you get what I mean! We spent some quality time at the beach lapping up the sun - a bit too much sun as we both turned into lobsters within about one minute!

We also took a 25c shuttle bus around South Beach to go to some shops or to get food which was handy, we used it to go to some of the beaches further up the island too. We managed to find out that you could rent umbrellas for only $10 for the day so we did that for two days which was nice as we didn't get as sunburnt! We ate a lot of sushi in Miami as we found a really cheap sushi place that was yummy and we hadn't eaten sushi in a long time so we made good use of that! There was also a lot of nightclubs and bars in Miami too.

All in all, we enjoyed our action packed theme park adventure in Orlando and then our relaxation-at- the-beach-doing-nothing, in Miami.

On the 15th we headed to Miami airport for our flight to LA, connecting through Houston Texas!

Stay tuned
Love Hayley & Shaun xoxo