Frommer’s Florida with Your Family: From Theme Park Fun to Sunny Beach Getaways (Frommers With Your Family Series)

Review by Bryan Newman for Frommer’s Florida with Your Family: From Theme Park Fun to Sunny Beach Getaways (Frommers With Your Family Series)
Rating:
This is a decent little book, but since it covers the entire state, it

needs to stick to the main attractions and does not got too deep into

any location. There will be just a couple of recommendations for

restaurants for example, and attractions like Gatorland are missing from

the Orlando coverage.

Quality: This book seems a little more glossy than the run of the mill

Frommer’s book and it did an excellent job when I was flipping through

and showing my seven year old possible things we could do while on our

vacation. It is not crammed with photos, but it has enough to make page

flipping worthwhile.

Coverage: Since my son is into nature and fossil collection, we needed a

lot more resources to find a fossil expedition and specific nature

stops. Also, since our trip was mainly concentrating on the southwest

coast, the other 3/4ths of the book did not help much. And as stated

above, there were not a whole lot of different options, this is a pretty

general book possibly because the targeted audience are British

vacationers focusing on Disney and Universal theme parks. The travel

information was decent, although quaintly British again.

British thing: Forgive me if I am missing something about Frommers, but

this book is strongly aimed at the British visitor to Florida. For the

most part this is no problem as long as you can get over hire car

instead of rental car or the idea of “liquified baby food,” But there is

a decidedly British tilt to attraction selection as well, for example

biplane rides for kids with Biggles fascination. Very few kids on this

side of the pond have any idea what Biggles is about. The book does not

say it is written for Brits but it seems to have been. (Even tells you

where you can get British newspapers.) It still worked for us as a very

high level overview of Florida, but to match our families interests, we

had to go other places as well.

Overall impression: Decent book, but light on specifics or depth of

choices. If you are looking for off the beaten track options you might

want