So if you are staying in the theme park capitol of the world without a car, you would have to relay on other methods of transport. HOWEVER Orlando do make it easier for you to visit all your favorite parks. When it comes to catching buses anywhere else, very rarely can you expect buses to arrive on time or to be reliable. The I-Ride however! Okay it's just like any other bus service but the majority of the time they are actually on time. The I-Ride trolley is a convenient and affordable way of getting around International Drive. It can take you all the way from outlet stores to Seaworld and Universal for just $2 each way, although if you work at any theme park in Orlando you can get on the bus for 25c. You can also transfer to a LYNX bus that will take you to Disney Springs and catch a bus from there to any Disney theme park. My only suggestion for the I-Ride is keep track of times, we were leaving Seaworld one day and had to wait an hour and a half to get back to our hotel.
We didn't start using the I-Ride Trolley till roughly 2 months into our program, for the first few weeks we used the public buses. The central Florida public buses are called LYNX and cost $2 for a one way ticket anywhere with free transfers. We used this service for our fort-nightly trips to Wal-Mart as the bus stop was directly outside our hotel and dropped off right outside Wal-Mart. If you aren't renting a car while out in Florida the public buses really are great, they only come once every hour and like most public buses are rarely on time but for $2 you can't complain.
Now the real hero of the story is the wonderful Uber. Uber is a smartphone app where you can request an uber driver to pick you up from your location just like a regular taxi but at a much cheaper rate. When we first got to Orlando we hadn't heard of Uber so we used regular taxi's to get around. To get from our hotel to Magic Kingdom with a yellow cab, it cost us just over $50. However with Uber it cost us roughly $15 to get to any Disney Park! When we would use regular taxi's the driver 90% of the time would make us feel uncomfortable, either by getting into crashes, making weird comments to us, speeding, texting, anything you could think of basically. With Uber that maybe happened 10% of the time, the majority of the time you just get somebody normal, like a student wanting to earn extra cash, or a dad taking on a second job and even though a couple of times they would take a long route to get somewhere, you can go on the app and change it so you don't get over charged. One of the major things to drive us away from yellow cabs was their abusive nature. When we would get an Uber from a theme park the cab drivers would get aggressive with the Uber drivers for 'taking their customers' a couple of times the cab drivers would get into fights with Uber drivers and bang on the car windows and scream abuse at us in the car! So if there's one thing to take away from this blog post, STAY AWAY FROM YELLOW CAB DRIVERS! Just get an Uber they are soooo much more convenient.
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