Florida Getaways 2008

Opposite, The Breakers, Palm Beach. Above left, Lakeside Inn, Mount Dora. Above right, Casa Monica Hotel, St. Augustine. When it comes to resorts, age and beauty coexist happily. Intricate handcrafted architectural detail, rich history and nonstandard everything are central to the charm of Florida’s oldest resorts. There are hundreds of historic hotels in the Sunshine State. Some were built at a time when guests arrived by carriage and skirts were never above the knee; others came during the age of the DC-3. As travel trends and fashions changed, so too did Florida’s hotels. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the inns were relatively small and wood frame. As America prospered, tycoons like Henry Flagler created great luxury palaces, built by men who were as bold as they were rich. Thankfully, many of these priceless live-in antiques are still around, though some now have modern necessities like electronic room keys and Wi-Fi. If you look beyond the chandeliers, ornate frescoes and heart-pine ﬂoors of these historic hotels, you will ﬁnd stories as colorful as their gardens. Here are but a few of Florida’s great, early inns and resorts. Through the Gilded Age Ecotourism may be trendy, but nature has always been central to the appeal of one of the state’s oldest continuously operated hotels, the Lakeside Inn in Mount Dora, northwest of Orlando. Opened in 1883, when travel ads and handbills promoted the Sunshine State as “America’s last frontier,” the inn welcomed guests who arrived at this hotel by horse and stayed for weeks. They hunted game, ﬁshed and went searching for things that slither with a snake handler from nearby Silver Springs. You can still sit on its veranda and enjoy a view of tranquil Lake Dora, or take a motorized boat tour of the Mount Dora canal, where you’ll see alligators, turtles and more birds than you can name. Its interior is Old-Florida romance, with ﬂoral fabrics, antiques and gourmet dining with a Dixie accent. Historic downtown Mount Dora is just around the corner, and the famed Renninger’s Antiques and Collectibles Market is a short drive away. (352-383-4101, www.lakeside-inn.com) While the Lakeside Inn was luring adventurous nature lovers, tycoons Henry Flagler and Henry Plant were planning Florida’s largest resort empires and the railroad lines to reach them. Flagler envisioned making the state’s east coast a tourism mecca, and in the mid-1880s he began building and buying resorts including the Casa Monica Hotel in St. Augustine, which opened in 1888. The regal, castle-like hotel in Northeast Florida has changed names and uses over the years (for a time it was the county courthouse), but it was refurbished and reopened as a four-star boutique hotel in 1999. Floridian Getaways 13 http://www.lakeside-inn.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Florida Getaways 2008

Florida Getaways 2008 Contents Shorts: Visit A Port or Airport Deals: Join a Museum Water: On Lake Apopka Suite History Circus City Listings: Florida Vineyards Ad Index Florida Maps Looking Back: On Old Florida

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