Christmas 2014

"A trip to Bok Tower Gardens today"?
My husband asks soon we were on the road to Lake Wales.
It only took me 30 minutes to pack the
luggage and fix our lunch to take along
and
off we went!
With a GPS and no traffic we made it in under three
hours.
Upon our late in the day arrival, we noticed that the parking
lot at Bok Tower Gardens was emptying. We were delighted
to park our car in one of the front rows.
Our arrival time of 2:45 PM was just right.
We were able to enter the visitor center and receive a map to
the towers and get and get some suggestions
from the volunteer clerk and then we were off
and running!
Seemed like people from all over the world were
here. In particular languages like Spanish and Japanese
were spoken. On our "run" to the tower we noticed healthy plants
and colorful flowers. The path to the tower was on an incline and Don
seemed to enjoy the pace, while I was a little out of
breath as the fast pace of nearly a jog was getting to me.
The chimes began at the top of the hour and we made it with
a minute to spare.
Since we were only interested in the bell tower,we had hurried our way
but even though the entire area was filled with maybe two hundred people,
we easily found a bench to listen to the chimes. (Chimes is not a good word
as some of the bells weigh two tons. Think Hunchback of Notre Dame!)
After 6 months of anticipation, I couldn't wait. We just listened and smiled and
listened some more....until I just had to say it. I was disappointed
as bells sounded out of tune! Then I whispered in Don's ear and jokingly said
that the music sounded like a little kid banging away on a toy piano on Christmas morning.
Also, the music was not at all familiar till towards the end of the thirty minutes.
Disney tunes like: "When you wish upon a star" and then the Mary Poppins "Spoon full of sugar makes the medicine go down".
Other than that, it didn't sound like a real melody. That being said, I have to cut the carrion player some slack as:
Later we took the time to read the map/flyer and found that the "concert" sounded better from afar.
Also after carefully reading the handout brochure, we discovered another part of the gardens to visit
at a future time, the 20 room mansion.
Now that we know the way to Lake Wales, we will be back. It was fun get out of Merritt Island and even though we were prepared to stay overnight and explore the town the next day, we decided not to as Lake Wales is really just several fancy malls and not a real town after all, so we decided to head home. Our stay
at the Bok Tower Gardens was one hour but it we had fun and we did have a chance to eat the
lunch I packed and the best part is we got to sleep in our own beds with a promise of another day trip tomorrow!