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.