Things To Do In SW Florida

Kissimmee is taking a new approach to help solve a problem that’s not — reinventing the city’s aging, motel-laden corridor.

The city is collaborating with the Orlando Economic Partnership (OEP) in a pilot program to breathe new life into Vine Street by attracting larger businesses to the area.

The partnership is part of the city’s plan to continue growing despite having only 850 acres of undeveloped land left.

Tom Tomerlin, city economic development director, said challenges facing Kissimmee are not unique.

“The exciting thing is that it’s going to take a fresh look at something that affects a lot of communities throughout the state,” Tomerlin said. “We have these arterial roadways that at one time served the retail needs of a community or even tourists in our case but … it’s a Florida problem of how corridors whose lifeblood shifted get reinvented.”

“Can a corridor like this that at one time was tourist-serving be reinvented in such a way that it becomes a job corridor? That is one of the interesting questions we are exploring.” read more

Travel writers Susan and Simon Veness were trying to escape the rat race when they hit the road for a year in an RV.

“For the last 20 years we have been working flat-out, seven days a week, never took time off,” Susan Veness says. “We didn’t take vacations, and we were so burned out that we just needed to hit the reset button.”

The Venesses took off in their 36-foot RV – dog Ruthie and a subcompact car in tow – with a route in mind that went to Michigan, then across the country to the West Coast before swooping down across the South and back home to Apopka.

“The challenge was to try and see as much of the country as we could. We really wanted to see America,” Simon Veness says.

Their mission was completed, mostly, and ended recently with a stay at Fort Wilderness at Walt Disney World. There were bumps along the way, including mechanical difficulties, a stretch of 19 days without hot water, tight mountain passes and harrowing bridges that might have contributed to high blood pressure. read more

A group hoping to persuade the Legislature to award the Florida Museum of Black History to the historic town of Eatonville has made another move to strengthen its bid, seeking $15 million in tourist-tax revenue for the project.

Presentations to the 10-member Orange County Application Review Committee won’t begin until July but funding requests submitted in April were unveiled Friday to the advisory panel tasked with recommending which groups should get public money for capital projects.

Eatonville’s pitch to the state of Florida already includes 10 acres of land on the old Hungerford School site adjacent to I-4, situated in the nation’s oldest incorporated Black municipality amid the strongest tourism economy in the nation. The $15 million — which would be allocated only if its bid wins — would be a financial sweetener on a level no other contending site is offering.

Requests totaled $126.4 million, Elyse Jardine of the United Arts of Central Florida told the board.

When Orange County commissioners decided last year to amend the tourist-tax spending plan, they agreed to make up to $15 million in uncommitted tourist-tax revenues available through ARC in each of the next five fiscal years, for a five-year total of $75 million. read more

NASA and Boeing need more time to make sure a helium leak on its CST-100 Starliner is low enough risk to send humans into space.

So the launch of NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams has now been pushed to May 25 targeting a 3:09 p.m. liftoff atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 41.

The duo were sitting in the capsule on the pad with about two hours left on the countdown clock on May 6 when a problem with a fluttering valve on the upper stage of the Atlas V forced mission managers to scrub.

After rolling the rocket back to ULA’s Vertical Integration Facility near the pad and switching out the valve, managers found a second issue with a small helium leak on the Starliner’s service module.

The source of the leak was traced to a flange on a reaction control thruster, and teams performed pressure tests that showed the leak was “stable and would not pose a risk at that level during the flight,” according to a NASA press release. read more

By Craig Joseph | NerdWallet

Checklists are a key step in travel preparation for many people. Passport — check. Phone charger — check. But have you checked to make sure you’re fully utilizing the travel perks offered by your credit card?

Whether you’re a seasoned jetsetter or a novice traveler seeing the world for the first time, benefits from the right credit card can make a trip more convenient and more comfortable. That’s good news for the 50% of Americans who plan to travel more in 2024 than 2023, according to a survey by IPX1031, a Fidelity National Financial Company.

Here’s a credit card checklist to review before you hit the road this summer.

1. Bring a card

First things first — be sure to bring a credit card! Many airlines, and even entire airports, are now cash-free. That means you’ll need a card to pay for that pre-departure drink or in-flight snack. You might even earn bonus rewards.

For example, if restaurants are a bonus category for your card, sit-down establishments within the airport will usually still earn that higher rewards rate. If your card earns a bonus on travel purchases, you’ll usually earn that bonus for in-flight purchases. read more