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When I wrote the chapter of Backroads of Paradise that took me through Orlando, I believe I opened the chapter with, “Orlando, you have broken my heart.”

I loved Orlando in college. When I enrolled at UCF, I lived on campus. This was UCF before it looked like it does today. UCF had yet to build apartments; the dorms were more… GenX. We didn’t have Pinterest boards to decide how to decorate them. We used toothpaste to hide nail holes in the walls, and we had a small fridge, a microwave, and an illegal hotplate.

I loved every minute of it.

Later, I’d move to Winter Park, and then Kissimmee, which are not technically Orlando but still somehow very much Orlando. I lived in a Winter Park apartment building that oozed charm; late, I moved to a cookie-cutter apartment building off 192 in Kissimmee.

I loved all that, too.

What I loved most about Orlando was its lack of cohesion and homogeneity. I loved the old wooden houses down brick streets, the preponderance of lakes, the way every home was different. Would there be built-in bookshelves or a secret garden? You never knew! The magic of Orlando was hidden in its details.

Oh, and Orlando food…

I adored the Black Eyed Pea, where I tasted fresh spinach for the first time ever (I swear to you I am not making that up). I fondly recall tasting my first bite of sushi at what is now Umi on Winter Park’s Park Boulevard (Hell, maybe it was called that then; I can’t recall), and buying and grinding my own beans at Barnie’s Coffee.  Honestly, I also have incredibly fond memories of Krystal Burger at 2 a.m. and Fazoli’s strawberry lemonade and breadsticks.

But I’ve read somewhere that you can never go home again, and when I revisited Orlando in 2011, I certainly thought that was true. It seemed as though the vibe had disappeared under a glut of strip malls and homogenized crap.

Turns out I wasn’t looking nearly hard enough.

More and more, I find myself back in Central Florida for various things, usually speaking- or writing-related. I spent a few nights at the Alfond Inn in Winter Park and rediscovered what I loved there (my old apartment is now labeled historic, which I can’t quite believe). I spent a wonderful afternoon recently communing with an Eastern Indigo snake in Oakland. And Winter Garden? I could spend the day in the Plant Street Market food hall.

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This week I’m staying at a delightful VRBO on South Mills, which is close to Lake Eola. I had one event on Disney property Friday and another in Oviedo Saturday, so we split the difference and found somewhere that looked interesting.

Turns out I found a VRBO super-close to where my podcast co-host and fellow Florida author Rick Kilby lives, and Thursday night he and his wife Julie introduced me to an Orlando artist, Victor Bokas. From the outside, Victor’s house looked ordinary enough, but once I stepped inside, I remembered that long-ago feeling of wonder and discovery I felt every time I walked inside an Orlando home.

Being inside Victor’s home was like being inside a Christmas tree and looking out. Every square inch of the walls had some wonderful assault on my eyes: Finsters, old family pharmacy letters he’d reworked with Advil and other pills, a wall of snow domes. I didn’t want to stop looking.

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The VRBO, too, has nooks and crannies. Beadboard ceilings, a meditation garden, and statues of the Buddha and mostly-naked Greco-Roman men.

The Real Florida Isn’t Gone

In short, being here this weekend reminds me of why, more than 30 years ago, I fell in love with Orlando.

And so my takeaway is this, to those of you — to those of us — who sometimes bemoan the Florida that we say has disappeared. Florida’s never really gone. It may feel as though the strip malls and chain stores are taking over, but if you take the time to look, you can still find slices of paradise.

Orlando is proof.