Urban Exploring in Orlando...

There are more than a few curious places to visit in the Orlando area! We found some great websites full of information about local abandoned and offbeat tourist attractions, like: Roadside America, Weird U.S., and Florida's Lost Tourist Attractions. Just down the road a few miles from Celebration we found the now closed and very creepy 'Jungleland Zoo' which still has the world's second largest alligator statue in the parking lot...

And we couldn't resist a drive over to downtown Kissimmee to find the 'Monument of States.' This creation was the vision of Dr. Charles Bressler-Pettis, who wanted a physical symbol of American unity in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack on the United States. He wrote letters to every governor and to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to send him local rocks to feature in his monument. The donations arrived in a variety of formats - blocks of native granite, chunks of quartz, small boulders, fossils, hunks of old buildings. One contributor even sent a human skull! We thought it was pretty cool...

Fun stuff for a Sunday afternoon :)