Today's adventure

Sunday is coming..........today is almost gone....

Lynx route 40 ......to where the sidewalk ends.

On the way to the Mall at Millenia the bus makes a stop at the Orlando Amtrak station and at the Orlando Health hospital campuses. Will it be a straight shot down Orange to Americana Blvd?

We turn right on Michigan and I see the Adult literacy League office next to Aramark. At the corner of OBT I See the Bargain Spot thrift store. We turn left onto Rio Grande. We are in Holden Heights. Rio Grande runs under I-4.  J.  points out his old apartment complex. When we turn right  at Honour Rd., he says he thinks this used to be a dirt road in the ice age of 1973 when he moved to Florida.  Just barely after Disney I'm thinking.  A left onto San Antonio, then we must have taken a right onto Americana and we went past Texas before we arrive at the Mall at Millenia.  I hear the young lady on the seat behind me say "old people don't need to go outside". I turned around to ask my question ..which was.......what do you call old?  The tall thin man with the black backpack in the white "tennis" got off somewhere along Americana before we reached the corner of Texas Ave.  He seemed to be probably Hispanic.  After we left the bus, the sidewalk took us right to IKEA instead of the mall.  The bushes around the perimeter of the parking lot in front of the mall and the lack of a sidewalk on the mall side or crosswalks to the mall imply the mall developers want to strongly discourage those people who don't have cars to transport purchases, from visiting this mall. Today we are the non car driving people who have taken public transit to arrive at the mall. We drove the truck to Colonial Plaza where we parked and hopped on the 313 to the Lynx Central station where we had transferred on to the 40. We like to take a bus adventures around Orlando periodically. We see streets and areas of town where we normally do not drive  and we walk and ride and wait for our busses to arrive with those of our community who get around town without a car.  This is our community.  The bus system is not the most luxurious transit mode on a Saturday afternoon adventure and most of our fellow   passengers are not on a leisurely afternoon excursion.  We both grew up in the midwest in towns where we used public transportation when we were teenagers and we like being brave in our "old age" and daring to do things we know some of our acquaintances would never dare. It is dark when we arrive back at the truck with my purchases in my new 99 cent IKEA shopping bag.  I found  gifts at IKEA for all of my sister's family members, two  of my other nieces, my two grandsons, and also picked up some cool food stuffs for the office Christmas luncheon.  We did finally find the one spot along the scary circular road around the mall where there is a break in the bushes and a sidewalk to let us walk safely from the IKEA parking  lot to the Bloomingdales parking lot. The only thing we bought at the mall was lunch at the food court shop the young man J mentors has been working.   J.  bought our lunch, 2 "Great Wraps" and I paid the  8 dollars for our round trip transit costs. It would be a dollar cheaper each way for us if we took the time to pick up our senior discount cards at Central Station. We hiked back to the bus stop and the sidewalk took us  in front of a shop where I stopped to purchase a gift certificate for an upcoming birthday of my daughter in "love".  I was able to complete most of my holiday gift shopping  today.  It was almost too easy .  J. carried the big blue IKEA bag around for me inside the mall.  Neither one of us missed driving on I-4 in traffic or looking for a place to park at the mall.