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Florida Tourist AttractionsGuide to roadside oddities and other weird, strange and unusual attractions in Florida.
Florida tourist attractions include the Fountain of Youth; Ready to drink from it? And then you’ll be brave enough to go gator-egg collecting. Or at least it’ll make you brave enough to visit the ghost at the Hard Rock Café in Key West. He won’t scare years off your life.
Pitch your tent in a chickee above alligator infested waters!
Photo courtesy Small Sail Boats. A chickee is a wooden platform on stilts over the water. And you take a cool ride in a canoe through the mangrove swamps to get to it! Here is an Everglades National Park map of campsite locations. Everglades National Park headquarters are in Homestead, Florida.
And at this Florida tourist attraction you can wake up in the morning to see a fish staring at you. Jules’ Undersea Lodge is just that – undersea. It began life as a research lab off the coast of Puerto Rico. It is now an underwater hotel in a coral lagoon in Florida. Now is that unusual lodgings or what!!! Not everyday you get to sleep underwater! Jules’ Undersea Lodge, Key Largo Underwater Park, 51 Shoreland Dr, Key Largo, Florida. Phone: (305)451-2353
And it’s the only haunted Hard Rock Café in the world. So you just have to stop in there! (Oh darn!)
The Hard Rock Café is at 313 Duval Street, Key West, Florida. However, to take in a lot more of haunted Florida tourist attractions in Key West, a ghost tour is the way to go. And the really great way to a haunted Key West is to stay in one of the haunted hotels featured on the tour and of course take the tour and eat at the Hard Rock Café! The Original Ghost Tours Key West can be reached at phone number: (305) 294-WALK
If you don’t go inside to see the weirdness these funky buildings have to offer, they’re still great roadside oddities photo opps from the outside!
Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Orlando Odditorium sure looks like it’s going down into a sinkhole, though. But that’s the way this weird tourist attraction was built.
Ripley’s Believe It Or Not is at 8201 International Drive. Phone: (407) 345-0501 The other weird building is upside right – that is if you’re standing on your hands!
WonderWorks is really cool. Inside are a bunch of interactive exhibits and simulator rides for natural disasters like earthquakes and tornados. Photos courtesy resorthoppers.com. Since WonderWorks was really a top-secret lab in the Bermuda Triangle. A tornado came down and swooped it up, transporting it to, of all places, Orlando, Florida. It crashed on an old 1930s brick warehouse.
WonderWorks is at 9067 International Drive, Orlando, FL
The ultimate adventure is collecting gator eggs. It’s seasonal, so you gotta be there in June or July. If you can’t make it then, there’s a couple of next bests. Okay. How can you have two next bests? Why not? All right. Fine. You decide. See? It’s hard to decide, huh. I know… Gatorland was opened in 1949. And just like all those good old tourist traps of yesteryear, entry to this Florida tourist attraction was made to catch your eye. You go through a huge open-mouthed, big-toothed gator jaw!
Photos courtesy Gatorland.
Look for the big open gator jaw entry at 14501 South Orange Blossom Trail, Orlando, FL. Phone: (407) 855-5496, Toll Free: 800-393-JAWS
Ponce de Leon landed here in 1513 and made a beeline for the Fountain of Youth. So is good ol' Ponce still alive? Uh, probably not.
But wait…. St. Augustine was founded in 1565 and that makes it the oldest city in the U.S. Since it’s been around that long, maybe there is something to the Fountain of Youth myth. Take a drink from this Florida tourist attraction in Ponce de Leon's Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park at 11 Magnolia Avenue, St. Augustine, Florida. Phone: (904) 829-3168 or Toll Free: 800-356-8222
No trip to Florida is complete without a trip on a glass bottom boat. Right? There are cruises to see coral reefs, shipwrecks, colorful fish, and dolphins. But why not try a different one? Okay. I’m up for different, you say. How about a glass bottom boat ride where you can see the fossilized bones of prehistoric mastodons at the bottom of a spring? Is that different enough for you?
For this Florida tourist attraction you need to go to Wakulla Springs State Park. Wakulla Spring is one of the largest and deepest freshwater springs in the world. There is a huge cave system underwater. Nope, no recreational diving in the cavern but the boat goes directly over the cavern and you can peer down into the deep blue void. The best time to go is spring and winter when headwaters are clearest.
And of course, besides the ancient animal bones littering the bottom of the spring bowl some 100 feet below, there’s bunches of live fish to see swimming around in the depths of the spring. Location: Wakulla Springs is about 14 miles south of Tallahassee. From the intersection of State Road 267, drive 1.2 miles southeast on State Hwy 61 to the entrance of the park.
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Even the palm trees are upside down to us people who are wandering around upright.
