And the area has theme parks to excite virtually any interest - the Flying Tigers Restoration Museum, the Orlando Science Center and John Young Planetarium, Gatorland, Reptile World Serpentarium, Splendid China, and the Green Meadows Petting Farm among other attractions designed for both entertainment and education.

Universal Studios Florida is one of America’s greatest destination theme parks where you can experience the glamour of Rodeo Drive, the glitz of Fifth Avenue, travel to Fisherman's Wharf, and sit in Pennsylvania Station. You'll see a collection of streets so meticulously detailed, you'll swear you were really there. It’s the largest motion pictures studio outside of Hollywood.

But, leave the Orlando area - its many golf courses and theme parks – and Polk County spreads out to the west until you reach Tampa, filled with historic attractions and just plain folk doing real things.

Oh, yes, there are major theme destinations like Cypress Gardens, but even that’s a lot different than what you find in Orlando. It’s a theme park based on real life.

If you haven’t been to the Gardens in the past 30 or so years you haven’t missed a beat – for the Gardens haven’t changed much since the 1930s when it was Florida’s first major attraction.

You can still walk among the fantastic flowers and see gracious Southern ladies in hoop skirts strategically placed for photos. It is running virtually the same entertaining water-ski show it did two generations ago and the massive gardens are still in full bloom year ‘round.

Close by is the Water Ski Hall of Fame in Winter Haven, where water skiing buffs can revel in seeing grainy videos, newspaper stories, boats, tow ropes, and rhinestone-covered water-ski show costumes worn by world champions.

Further west – towards Tampa – the real heart of Florida gradually opens like one of those Cypress Gardens flowers and the line between theme parks and reality becomes blurred and then vanishes altogether as you experience life as real Floridians live it.

Drive along the off-freeway paved roads, and you wind past orange groves, small towns, and past buildings that look as though they’ve been produced for a 1930s movie set. But they aren’t part of a theme park. They’re real and that’s the joy of Polk County.

In the Spring, you can sit in classic baseball parks, watching millionaire ball players loosen their muscles for the real thing during the Grapefruit League season in February and March. Lakeland hosts the Detroit Tigers, Haines City the Kansas City Royals and Winter Haven the Cleveland Indians.

Ask at any tourist office and get a map that leads to wildlife parks, state parks, and off-beat historic sites that aren’t usually found in travel agent guidebooks.

Little known, for example, is that Polk country has the largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings in America, located on the campus at Florida Southern College in Lakeland.

While the 10 buildings are in daily use, you can tour them for free and regale in the stories about the architect who continued to create buildings with leaky roofs throughout his career.

And there’s the small, creaky Railroad Museum in downtown Lake Wales that traces the railway’s history of the area in a series of photos from the mid-1920s. Remarkably, the town that surrounds the station looks virtually the same. Across the tracks and the old renovated rail cars that serve as restaurants, is a heritage house being converted to a museum/gallery.

The major acquiescence to theme parks is just outside Polk City, where there’s an aircraft museum called, Fantasy of Flight where old airplanes sit spotless and carefully restored. You can walk through a Second World War B-17 bomber and understand the perils that went with those who flew in the surprisingly thin-skinned aircraft.

Once you’ve left Polk Country and approach Tampa, the more contemporary Central Florida becomes until you find yourself once again in the world of theme parks and make believe.

And as much as you can enjoy the pleasures of Busch Gardens with its magical rides and where you can take an open-vehicle tour among African wildlife, it’s a walk out of reality and into the world of make-believe.

And you find yourself missing that small touch the real Florida.