So my sons, myself and my parents are going to be staying in a condo in Daytona Beach for a week. We are driving down from Ohio. We have tickets to Universal Studios so will spend one whole day in Orlando checking out the Harry Potter park and riding rides.
But aside from that, there’s swimming in the ocean, building sand castles, going out to eat and…what else? We are going to be doing a lot of relaxing and will likely cook a lot of our own meals in the condo kitchen, but what fun stuff is there to do there?
My Dad’s a retired Army general, I am former Army and my sons are into military stuff…are there any aviation museums nearby, or any sort of military/historical stuff to do?
What about anything else? I have been to Florida before but never to Daytona. I would like some suggestions on nearby things to do from our Florida Dopers.
If you’re looking for history and military sites, you’re about fifty miles south of Saint Augustine. You’ve got Castillo de San Marcos and Fort Matanzas there.
Oooh…sounds interesting. Keep the suggestions coming! Its starting to sound like there’s not much to do in Daytona Beach proper, which I always associated with the Daytona 500, Spring Break madness and little else.
My Dad is 71, so he’s not going to be hip to anything extreme, but we can drive somewhere within a 50 or so mile radius if there’s something worthwhile to do. As much as I love the ocean, I don’t want to spend every day at the beach while we are there.
(the Pier’s actual website hasn’t caught up with that news yet)
Ocala National Forest is west of Daytona, same kind of distance as Cape Canaveral and St. Augustine:
This is exactly the kind of info I need…thank you! My oldest son has recently taken a shine to fishing…I wonder how he’ll like fishing off the pier (assuming you can).?
Kennedy Space Center is located between Patrick AFB (an open base) and Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge. Port Canaveral (cruise ships and commercial shipping) is in the area, too.
Honestly, when I was there (I, er, did Spring Break as a 25 year old library science student - felt it was my last chance, you know) I had NO interest whatsoever in the racetrack… but we went and it was absolutely fascinating! It’s a bit expensive, but the museum is very interesting and I learned a lot about the early days of racing cars. They had some really cool exhibits, one particularly memorably about how they put together the radio broadcast of a race. And the track tour is neat - they let us try to walk up the banked turns, and you make it maybe three steps and fall down.
We enjoyed the lighthouse museum very much - it’s a very complete lighthouse “campus” and they have a first order Fresnel lens IIRC, which is cool. Plus, hilariously we found out that night that the wristbands for the lighthouse fluoresce in the club.
