If you want a wake-up call of big city living, just drive down the turnpike about 55 miles and exit onto 441 north about a mile on the right will be Florida Mall. We made the mistake visiting this past Saturday. I guess with the rain, everybody decided to go there. We've been to Florida Mall about a dozen times the past four years, but this past Saturday was the worse.
First we drove around for several minutes in a downpour just to find a parking spot, so were several dozen other cars on every side of the building. We finally found a space outside of Dillards which we would normally never park at to enter the mall. If you go into Dillards in Ocala or Gainesville you would usually find nobody there. This Dillards had crowds like they were giving stuff away. It's probably one of the most expensive department stores around, it makes Macys look cheap.
Once we got through Dillards and into the mall, it was worse than Black Friday, which we have done, it was worse than Christmas season. You'll also find that if English is your first language, then you're a minority. I've figured out that since Puerto Rico is a short plan ride away from Orlando, most of the people in PR most visit there monthly along with tourist from every South American country.
The old food court has been closed and they have built a new one that opened in June, it is huge and yet was still packed and tables were hard to find. One of the negatives is Dairy Queen did not make it from the old food court to the new one, maybe the rent was too high. There must be 30 places to get food and yet everyone had a huge line.
After making our walking trip through Florida Mall we couldn't wait to get on the road and back to TV. From now on, the Oaks Mall in Gainesville will be our permanent big mall away from here. It has many of the same stores, and have 5 anchor stores and is almost never crowded except at Christmas time.
If the crowds weren't enough, Florida Mall even has it's own hotel attached to the mall. Also nearby are two huge outlet malls on each end of International Drive.
