The Great Experiment

Tuesday, July 18, 2000: I was Kristy's (DisNut's) excuse for playing hooky from work today, and in return I got to ride around in her new car while I dragged her all over Celebration. Not a bad deal!

Is this a building or a cantaloupe?

The post office

The Preview Center's tower, again

Two Cadillacs in front of the Celebration Hotel

A 'NEV', or 'Neighborhood Electric Vehicle': Celebration's answer to the golf cart

I specifically set out today to verify or refute the negative comments I have been told about Celebration by numerous friends and acquaintances. The lady at the Celebration souvenir store (a different one than I met there last week) said, "Do any of those people who made those negative comments actually live here in Celebration? I didn't think so." She echoed the comments of her coworker: Celebration is not paradise, but it might be about as close as anyone's reasonably going to get. The woman at the Preview Center was a little more starry-eyed; when I asked her 'what are the downsides of living here?' she replied 'I can't think of any,' so I took what she said with a grain of salt... but I did get concrete answers from her to some questions on my mind.

• Is it more expensive to have a home in Celebration than in other nearby parts of Florida? Yes, it costs about thirty-three percent more to have a home here, but in return you're getting a community where you know all of your neighbors, where you can take a walk downtown, where most of the homes have large front porches for socializing, with their driveways and trash cans behind the house. "Besides, practically everyone here has an Annual Pass, and you can hop over to any of the parks for lunch without even needing to get near the highways!"
• If I have a house here, do I own the land it's on? Yes. The homeowner also owns the land, not Celebration or Disney.
• Can Celebration residents get broadband Internet access, such as through DSL? I got qualified 'no's on this one, unfortunately, along with some nonspecific complaints about the area's Disney-run phone company. No one knew for certain... but people generally thought DSL (and cable modem access, too) isn't available in Celebration. However, every house and apartment I looked in had a port labelled 'CAT5 DC' on the wall in several rooms, and people seemed to believe that this had something to do with Celebration's "Front Porch" intranet to which all residents have access -- but again, no one had any specifics on this. I need to do more research here. "But there are lots of entrepreneurs here in Celebration," the Preview Center lady told me, "and maybe you might be the person to start an ISP to bring DSL to us!"

My conclusion is that I figure that either Celebration is really a pretty good place once you take everything into account, or else there's an alien mind probe hidden somewhere in the town that's making everyone a Disney zealot. I'm still looking for the hidden alien mind probe.

Kristy and I first stopped by the local grill to have lunch. It was something straight out of 'The Truman Show': I mentioned to Kristy that I was considering getting a cheesesteak, and a moment later the waitress stopped by and said, "So you'll be having a cheesesteak, right?" I nearly fell over until I remembered I had mentioned it, and figured that the waitress probably overheard me. Probably. (or else the hidden alien mind probe helped)

We then returned to the demo homes I had seen last week. I revisited the Cottage home (third largest style), which I've decided is plenty large but doesn't have enough really usable space for me -- a lot of it is eaten up by hallways and excessively large bathrooms. Then I toured some Village homes (second largest style), and was quite impressed by them. A Victorian village home (about $400k?) might be the one I want.

A Village home in the Victorian style

The bugs here are big, but still as sociable as the neighbors

A lizard half the size of the grasshopper

We then stopped by the Preview Center again, where I managed to look serious enough to convince them to take me on a tour of some of the Estate homes (the largest style).

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