Night Walks

For much of my life since graduating from college, I have lived in the standard cookie-cutter apartment complexes that one finds in publications like “Apartment Finder.” For whatever reason, I have never had the urge or desire to buy a house. In Wilmington, NC, I lived at Colonial Parke Apartments. In Alexandria, Virginia, I resided at Riverside Apartments. In Las Vegas, it was Las Palmas Apartments. In Tallahassee, it was Alumni Village.

When I moved to Kissimmee, though, it was the first time I utilized “Craig’s List” to find a place to live. I’m not sure that I can fully recommend consulting Craig’s List for this purpose. It is definitely hit or miss. But the web site opened my mind up to another way of living. There are actually unique and cool options outside of the apartment complexes which had previously been the only places I would look.

I have found a great area, called the Beaumont Historic District in downtown Kissimmee, where there are no big apartment complexes, but rather large old Victorian style houses that have often been divided into individual living units.

Though Kissimmee is the gateway to Disney World and host to two Major League Baseball teams during spring training, in reality Kissimmee is a small town.

Main Street is a pretty strip of old shops and newer restaurants, and the buildings have an aged feeling to them, either because of the style in which they are built or because they were in fact constructed in the 1800s or early 1900s. At night, I often go for walks or jogs down Main Street.

Main Street and all of downtown Kissimmee for that matter is very quiet after the sun goes down. The first few times I went for a walk, it surprised me that there was absolutely no one on the streets. It is very unlike Miami, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, and San Francisco- four cities where I have also enjoyed night time strolls. In contrast to the interesting characters on the streets in those large cities, usually the only living creatures I encounter in Kissimmee are stray cats and a couple of raccoons.

The quiet emptiness as I walk through downtown makes me notice other things.

Trees take on characters of their own. A tree can look very different at night under the stars, or perhaps with the moon giving it a silhouette. Historic downtown is filled with magnolias and huge, old oaks covered in Spanish moss.

Train tracks pass right behind the Courthouse, close to Lake Tohopekaliga. The tracks run parallel to Main Street, stretching straight out of sight to the north and rounding a curve if one looks to the south. Amtrak and CSX use the line regularly.
One night when I was actually out for a run instead of a walk, I heard the whistle blowing in the distance. Immediately, I sprinted for the tracks and got there just as the red flashing lights turned on at the crosswalk and the guard rail came down.

An especially long train, pulled by three engines, roared past me three or four feet away. It was probably not a wise decision to stand so close to the tracks, but I had never had the chance to see a training barreling through a quiet lonely night like that. The breeze that all the rail cars generated was impressive, and I did in fact take a few steps back when I thought about a reverse breeze and how it might be strong enough to suck me under the wheels.

Standing that close to the speeding train, I also was aware of how high the box cars were. Most of them were double stacked. It simply was a huge amount of metal and energy. And then the last car passed me. I stepped onto the tracks and watched as it faded into the darkness, heading north, the sound of the engines now gone and the sound of the wheels on the track quickly growing faint…

One might get the impression from reading this blog entry that Main Street and downtown Kissimmee is a lonely place after dark.

Daytime is certainly different, with all the shops and restaurants open and people and families bustling about. I am sure that I could write an entry about that if I had more experience with it. In the day, though, I am at work. Almost all of my observations of downtown have come after dark when I have some leisure time to explore. Perhaps you should look at kissimmeemainstreet.com to help get a feel of the place during the day.

But I enjoy my nighttime walks and jogs down Main Street.

Spring Training Baseball

There are many great things about living in this part of Florida.

One of my favorite discoveries thus far is spring training. For those who are not fans of Major League Baseball, each year several teams come down to Florida beginning in February and play against each other in exhibition games. Every day until the beginning of April, the teams take to fields across central and south Florida. Each team has its own small stadium, its spring training home. The city of Kissimmee hosts two teams. The Atlanta Braves play at Champions Stadium at Disney World, and the Houston Astros play at Osceola County Stadium.

I like Osceola County Stadium the best. It is only about a 10 minute drive from my house, and it is quite small. When I walked up to the booth to buy a ticket to the Astros versus the New York Mets in mid March, the game was sold out except for standing room only. But even with my standing room only ticket, I felt like I was right on top of the field. It was rather amazing to me to be that close to the players in an actual game. It was a much more casual and relaxed atmosphere than the crowd and security one encounters at a regular season game.

Right next to the stadium on Highway 192 is a small and colorful restaurant called “The Cheesesteak Factory,” which I guess is a play on the title of delicious chain restaurant, “The Cheesecake Factory.” The Cheesesteak Factory is not a chain, though. I’ve seen the person I assume to be the owner hard at work getting things ready just before it opened at 11am, and he is there every day personally cooking the meals. The restaurant boasts that it has the best cheesesteaks south of Philadelphia. After eating there, I have no reason to doubt it. They also serve a terrific chicken cheesesteak sandwich. A lady who works there told me that they get really busy this time of year, especially when the Philadelphia Phillies are in for a game. One day during the work week when I stopped there to grab a quick lunch, Milt Thompson, a former player for the Phillies and now a coach in the Houston Astros organization was collecting a whole pile of cheesesteak sandwiches for the players as they took on the Washington Nationals.

Unfortunately, tickets to a spring training game are just as expensive (if not more so) than for a regular season game. Atlanta played Detroit on March 30 at Disneyword, and I paid close to $30 just to have spot on the grass down the left field line. Obviously, the crowds at these games are well-to-do. It is mainly young professionals who bring out their families, or retired folks.

At the Astros/Mets game at Osceola County Stadium where I mentioned I bought a standing room only ticket, I also had one of the most interesting conversations of my life with a stranger.

He told me he was an independent computer consultant for most of his career in New York City, though now he worked for IBM. He stood beside me and we talked for almost the entire game. He had a reserved seat behind the Astros dugout, but where I was standing was shaded. He preferred this to roasting in the sun with his family. A lifelong Mets fan, his son lived in Tampa and had just become father to a little girl. The man was down from New York visiting his new granddaughter.

Among the things we talked about were how the computer industry had changed over his career, the Mets chances for this year, the passing of former Mets catcher Gary Carter (who was one of my first baseball heroes. I remember Gary Carter was in my very first pack of baseball cards- 1984 Topps. It was an All-Star card for the Montreal Expos).

The conversation became extremely interesting for me when the man told me that he was inside the World Trade Center on September 11.

Not many people had arrived yet at his office on the 90th floor that morning, he said. He told me that the first plane came in and struck the tower three floors above him. He was not near a window, but he heard a loud boom, and the building moved about eight feet, then came back.

“What the hell was that?” he asked a coworker.

“Never mind what it was,” the coworker replied. “Let’s get out of here.”

They walked the 90 floors down to the ground level.

I asked him if he heard when the second plane hit, and he said no. The stairwell they used to exit the tower was its own independent structure. “It was a concrete tomb,” he said. “You couldn’t hear anything on the outside.”

By the time the he reached the ground floor, both buildings were burning and people were jumping from the upper floors. He was directed to an alternate exit, one he had never used before, to avoid the jumpers.

I asked him how many people died that he knew, and he said three. One was a police captain that he said hello to each morning as he entered the building. She stood a post at the World Trade Center. He remembered thinking that it was odd that a police captain would stand a post each day, but there she was.

On September 11, she was helping direct people from the entrance lobby out of the building. Too many people were trying to crowd through a door of a glass wall in the lobby, so she used her side arm to shoot out the glass wall.

That police captain was one of the people who died when the building collapsed.

I asked the man if he got caught up in in the tremendous dust cloud after the buildings collapsed, and he said no. When the first tower collapsed, he ran for two or three blocks. The dust never reached him.

The man must have seen the skeptical look on my face when he said he ran two or three blocks. To be honest, he was quite fat.

“Yeah,” he said, “if it happened today I would just have to let all that stuff envelope me.”

He lived in a suburb of New York City, but he walked all the way home on September 11. The hours after the planes hit and the buildings collapsed showed New York City at its finest, he said. Restaurants and businesses were giving out free food and water to people as they walked away from Ground Zero.

I could see that telling the story to me had taken some energy out of him, and he said he needed to find his family. I congratulated him again on becoming a grandfather. We said goodbye without knowing each other’s name…

The baseball game itself was quite enjoyable. The Astros won, 9-5, and the weather was fantastic.

Almost every day the weather is fantastic here in Kissimmee. This is a great place to live.

-Nathan Marshburn