A Time of Magic

The problem with planning Orlando vacations is that that there’s just too much to see if you’re going for anything less than a month and even then you’d have trouble packing it all in.

As usual, the front runner for the kids is Disney World of course though that’s largely down to the massive advertising spend that’s put into promoting it. The big downside of it is that there’s so much packed into the place that you really need to pace yourself and anything longer than two or three days is going to be extremely tiring for young children even though that’s far too short a time to see it all. And each year it just gets “worse” with more and more attractions added.

Around the Orlando area there’s heaps of other things to do with a very high density of theme parks but there’s also a fair amount in terms of natural attractions too with great beaches and wildlife to be seen.

Basically though there’s so many attractions that you need to plan on going back several times over the years.

Hardly a day goes by without some family living on social security being pointed out as a bunch of layabouts because they’ve seemingly made a positive choice to live that way rather than to look for a job, but with the rules as they are, why would they look for a job?

Taking as a basis the so-called typical family of two adults, two kids they can easily get clear of £15,000 a year net, equivalent to a gross salary of over £21,000 and closer to £25,000 by the time you add in even basic housing benefits for an average area of the country. The problem is that all of the example families pulled out by the newspapers seem to be fairly unskilled therefore probably able to attract a maximum salary of around £12,000 thus it’s rather unlikely that they’d be able to get a job paying over twice that.

That’s just for the basic benefits and there are a lot more to be had once you’re getting one of the passport benefits like job seekers. It’s impossible to list them all but some examples are free school meals, payments towards school uniforms, reduced fees (often zero) on courses, reduced entry fees to some places and so on. Depending on your interests that could easily add several thousand pounds a year to the payments. And, of course, that’s for an average family in an average area of the country: each additional child adds about £5,000 to that gross salary and more expensive areas of the country can add substantially to the housing benefit available.

No job certainly looks like quite an attractive option these days.

Greenways are the in thing these days basically because they let councils show an eco friendly face, use what would ordinarily be waste land and collect lots of grant money.

That said, they do provide genuine advantages to the communities through which they run. For instance, the disused railway embankment behind our house had became largely a muddy path surrounded by weeds which were regularly set fire to over the summer. That was maybe a decade or so ago when they decided that it should be a greenway.

Over a fairly short period of time, the muddy path was replaced by a tarmac one, the weeds were cut back and trees were planted along the route. We all thought that the burning would continue but in fact it’s never happened since.

The only downside now is that the greenway was put in a little bit too soon as it doesn’t have the lighting that later ones have so you can’t really use it at night. In fact, that’s just one of a whole raft of improvements that we’ll see in a second similar scheme that’s being created as from this November. I’ve walked along parts of what’ll be the new route and they seriously need a cleaning out but in a few years time that’ll all change.

A bit of a gimmic name-wise, but one that’s worth having for all the plus points that it attracts.